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Artworks
Kingsley Tjungurray
Stars, Rain and Lightening at Night [formerly Storm], 1971Synthetic Polymer and enamel paint on composition board27 ¹³⁄₁₄ x 9 ⅛ inches (70.63 × 23.18 cm)Photo: Tony De Camillo for the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell UniversityProvenance
The Artist, painted at Stuart Art Center, Alice Springs, Northern Territory, circa 1971
Stuart Art Center, Alice Springs, Northern Territory, Consignment #1 painting 10
Private Collection, Queenland
Sotheby’s, Important Aboriginal Art, Melbourne 29 June, 1998, lot 22
Collection of John and Barbara Wilkerson, New York
Exhibitions
Icons of the Desert: Early Aboriginal Paintings from Papunya, The Herbert F Johnson Museum, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, 10 January - 5 April 2009; Fowler Museum of Cultural History, University of California, Los Angeles, 3 May - 2 August, 2009; Grey Art Gallery, New York University, New York, 1 September - 5 December, 2009
Abstraction & the Dreaming: Aboriginal Paintings from Australia’s Western Desert (1971 – Present), Nora Eccles Harrison Museum of Art, Utah State University, Utah, 11 September - 12 December 2015
Australian Consulate-General New York, Official Consul General Residence, New York, 5 October 2021 - 20 October 202260 over 50: 60 Paintings from 50 Years of Australian First Nations Art, UOVO, New York, 15-20 May 2023Publications
Sotheby’s, Important Aboriginal Art, Melbourne, 1998 p. 22
Geoffrey Bardon and James Bardon, Papunya, A Place Made After the Story: The Beginnings of the Western Desert Painting Movement, The Miegunyah Press: Melbourne, 2004, p. 106, painting 15
Vivien Johnson, Lives of the Papunya Tula Artist, IAD Press, p. 58 (illus.)
Vanessa Merlino and Luke Scholes, 60 over 50: 60 Paintings from 50 Years of Australian First Nations Art, UOVO, 2023, p. 36-37 (illus.)
Fred Myers and Terry Smith, Six Paintings from Papunya: A Conversation, Duke University Press: Durham, 2024
"The subject matter is identified as an ancestral story of rain and lightning, marked by the jagged central figure as an icon of lightning transposed from ceremonial body painting, while small circular figures elsewhere in the painting represent stars." (Fred Myers and Terry Smith, "The Eternal Recurrence of Origins: Kingsley Tjungurrayi" Stars, Rain, and Lightning at Night, 1971 in Six Paintings from Papunya: A Conversation)
“This is one of the earliest paintings to emerge from the small collective of Aboriginal artists who began painting at Papunya in the early 1970s. Kingsley Tjungurrayi was one of the artists who requisitioned an abandoned settlement office as an artists’ studio.
The painting having been completed on a found length of timber, the artist has used salvaged enamel house paint to represent a lightning storm. The small, dotted circles depict stars, and the sinuous line depicts lightning as it illuminates the night sky. It is likely that the ancestral being Winpa, known colloquially as the ‘Lightning Man’, conjured this storm as he sang and clapped his boomerangs, thereby generating large thunderous clouds accompanied by devastating rain and hail.” (Vanessa Merlino and Luke Scholes, 60 over 50: 60 Paintings from 50 Years of Australian First Nations Art, 2023, p. 36)
![Kingsley Tjungurray, Stars, Rain and Lightening at Night [formerly Storm], 1971](https://artlogic-res.cloudinary.com/w_2400,h_2400,c_limit,f_auto,fl_lossy,q_auto/ws-twocollections/usr/images/artworks/main_image/items/c4/c41d4dec407d4253815298850e97645d/stars-rain-and-lightening.jpg)