GEORGE TJAMPU TJAPALTJARRI

George Tjampu Tjapaltjarri (born around 1930 – 2005) is an Australian Aboriginal painter of the Pintupi language and a figure in the Western desert art movement. Born in Tikilpa, southwest of Lake Mackay, he grew up according to the traditional nomadic lifestyle in the Gibson desert before joining the Papunya community in the 1950s-1960s. A man initiated holding high ritual responsibilities in the preservation of (The Dreamtime), he began to paint in the early 1970s within the Papunya Tula Artists cooperative. His work, marked by geometric compositions with interwoven patterns and the use of pigments with earthy tones, recounts ancestral stories related to the sacred sites of the desert, vital waterholes, as well as the Dreamings of the Staff and the Serpent. Settled later in Kiwirrkura during the movement to return to ancestral lands, he leaves a sober and rigorous work today preserved in major institutions such as the National Gallery of Australia and the Art Gallery of New South Wales.