Lot 47: UTA UTA TJANGALA , WYUTA TJUKURRPA (POSSUM DREAMING AT NGAMUNANGYA) 1976

Bears Papunya Tula Artists catalogue number UU761272 on the reverse Synthetic polymer paint on canvas

171 by 168.5 cm

Painted for Papunya Tula Artists in December 1976
Private collection, Melbourne

Cf. Tingari at Lake McDonald, 1979, in the collection of the South Australian Museum, in O?Ferrall, M., Crossroads ? Towards a New Reality. Aboriginal Art from Australia, The National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto, Japan, 1992, p.87, catalogue number 58, illus.

Uta Uta is renowned for his highly formal paintings of rituals. The symmetry of these compositions reflects the formality of ceremony and suggests the structured nature of the world created by the ancestral beings.

The painting depicts the ceremonial ground design of the Pintupi people?s Possum (Wyuta) Dreaming at Ngamunangya, a rockhole and cave site on the eastern side of Lake Mackay. Three ceremonial leaders (the U-shapes) are depicted around the large roundel of the ritual painting. Groups of men participating in the ceremony are represented by the roundels along the borders of the canvas. These are joined by angled lines that are images of the men?s legs in dance. The places for the young initiates are situated between the central roundel and the men?s outer camps. The whole scene is surrounded by sandhills.