Born in 1943, George Hairbrush Tjungurrayi was one of the significant members of the Western Desert art movement. Learning from some of the prominent artists in the Papunya art community, Tjungurrayi began to paint in 1976. While Tjungurrayi’s works echo the painting style of Papunya Tula Artists of the Western Desert, he has established his own distinctly minimalist style. The linear fields of his desert landscapes are rippled with mesmerising ebbs and flows. Tjungurrayi illustrates topographical points of ancestral land through the use of a refined colour palette and earthy tones.

Depicting sites of cultural significance, his works convey Indigenous stories. Notably, Tjungurrayi paints the Tingari stories of his ancestral land—the Dreaming for the Pintupi language group. In these stories, ancestral elders traversed the Western Desert region of Australia, performing ceremonies and rituals and creating the country.

Today, Tjungurrayi is one of Papunya’s most coveted painters. He was a Wynne Prize finalist in 2007, awarded Highly Commended in the 34th Alice Prize in 2006 and acknowledged as one of the “50 Most Collectable Artists” by Australian Art Collector Magazine in 2003.

Compare: Untitled, 2000 in the collection the Art Gallery of NSW. Aquired in 2000 for a closely related painting using a similar palette.