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Artworks
Charlie Tarawa (Tjaruru) Tjungurrayi
Moon Love Dreaming of Man and Woman – Medicine Story, 1971Synthetic polymer paint on composition board24 ¼ max x 19 ⅞ inches (61.6 max x 50.48 cm)© The Estate of the Artist, by permission of Papunya Tula Artists through the Aboriginal Artists Agency. Photography by Tony De Camillo for the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell UniversityPintupi Language Group Provenance
The Artist, painted west of Sandy Blight Junction, Western Australia, 1971
Stuart Art Centre, Alice Springs, Northern Territory, consignment 8, painting 35, cat. no. 8035
Deutscher-Menzies, Melbourne, Fine Aboriginal Art, 29 June 1999, lot 58
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
Tjukurrtjanu: Origins of Western Desert Art, The Ian Potter Centre, National Gallery Victoria, Melbourne, Australia, 30 September 2011- 12 February 2012; Musee du quai Branly, Paris, France, 9 October 2012- 20 January 2013
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 2022
60 over 50: 60 Paintings from 50 Years of Australian First Nations Art, UOVO, New York, May 2023
Publications
Bardon, Geoffrey, and James Bardon. Papunya, A Place Made After the Story: The Beginnings of the Western Desert Painting Movement. The Miegunyah Press, 2004, p. 300, painting 241.
Benjamin, Roger, Fred Myers, Vivien Johnson, et al. Icons of the Desert: Early Aboriginal Paintings from Papunya. Herbert F. Johnson Museum, Cornell University, 2009, pp. 92–93
Deutscher-Menzies. Fine Aboriginal Art. Melbourne, 29 June 1999, p. 49; cover (illus.)
Merlino, Vanessa, and Luke Scholes. 60 over 50: 60 Paintings from 50 Years of Australian First Nations Art. UOVO, 2023 (illus.)
"A classic simplicity of forms show the curved moon representing a woman, the straight line representing a man and the horizontal bars for body paint."
—Papunya, A Place Made After the Story: The Beginnings of the Western Desert Painting Movement, 2004, p. 300
“Charlie Tarawa’s Moon Love Dreaming of Man and Woman – Medicine Story alone survives from a series of four Medicine Stories on the theme of love magic that Bardon documented in October-December 1971. Elemental traveling lines (brown parallel lines) connect up the “sit-down places” (concentric circles). Within the pictorial frame so formed against the black, U-shapes with a straight bar represent the sexually erect men, and the receptive U-shapes in the women, in Moon Spirit Form.”
—Icons of the Desert: Early Aboriginal Paintings from Papunya, 2009, pp. 92–93
Related artworks-
Charlie Tarawa (Tjararu) Tjungurrayi, An Audience with the Queen, 1989 -
Charlie Tarawa (Tjaruru) Tjungurrayi, The Trial, 1972
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