Artist: Ningura Napurrula
Skin Name: Napurrula
Language: Pintupi
Region: Kintore
Dreaming: Ancestoral travels  Womens business
Ningurra Napurrula’s Untitled (Wirrulnga) adorns the recently completed Musee du Quai Branly in Paris where her distinctive black and white motif is superimposed on the ceiling of the museum’s administration section. Closer to home, Australian viewers might know her equally striking design for the $1.10 stamp in Australia Post’s 2002 Art of the Papunya series. Working with women’s stories, often those of women travelling through the country, Napurrula extends the legacy of her late husband, the well known Yala Yala Gibbs Tjungurrayi, a founder of Western Desert painting. In the words of panellist Susan McCulloch: ‘’Ningura is one of the most striking women painters of the Kintore region. Her works are highly traditional in women’s iconography and show great strength of line and reductive colouration. Often working on a large scale, her paintings are distinguishable for their strongly lined patterns built up in layers to give a particular depth of field’’.
Born around 1938 at Watulka, Central Australia, Napurrula moved to Papunya in the 1960’s and started painting for Papunya Tula Artists Co-operative in 1996, part of a group of elderly women painters from Kintore and Kiwirrkura. Napurrula, who observed her husband, Yala Yala Gibbs Tjungrrayi (now deceased), at work, softens the classic Pintupi style of circles and connecting lines with swirling striations that produce a dynamic effect.
Her initial Papunya Tula Artists exhibition in 1996 was followed by serveral group shows in Sydney, Melbourne and Darwin in 1999. Napurrula’s first solo exhibition was held at William Mora Galleries in 2000, that same year her work was included in Papunya Tula: Genesis and Genius at the Art Gallery of New South Wales. Napurrula has shown widely in Australia and Internationally. Her work is in the following collections: National Gallery of Australia; Art Gallery of New South Wales, Australian Institute for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies; the Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory.

Collections:
•    AIATSIS, Canberra
Exhibitions:
•    2001 Pintupi, Alice Springs
•    2002 Araluen Arts Centre, Alice Springs
•    2003 Glen Eira City Council Gallery, Melbourne
•    2003 Gallery Gabrielle Pizzi, Melbourne
Awards:
•    2001, finalist 18th Telstra NATSIAA
•    2002, 32nd Alice Prize, highly commended