Anatjari Tjakamarra

Who was Anatjari Tjakamarra?

Anatjari Tjakamarra was a Central Australian Aboriginal artist who was part of the Papunya Tula art movement. He came from the area of Kulkuta, southeast of Kiwirrkura in Western Australia. He was a Pintupi man.

He came into Papunya in the early 1960s from the Western Desert. He was working there as a gardener when Geoffrey Bardon began encouraging the men to paint using western style materials in the early 1970s.

He left Papunya at the start of the outstation movement, establishing Tjukula in Western Australia, southeast of his birthplace and near the Northern Territory border. During much of the 1980s, when this painting was done, he worked and sold his art independently.

After settling at Kiwirrkura late in the decade, he began working through Papunya Tula Pty Ltd. He has his first solo exhibition at the Gallery Gabrielle Pizzi in 1989, and another in the same year at the John Weber Gallery in New York. The Metropolitan Museum of Art acquired his painting Tingari Dreaming Cycle that year; this represented the first acquisition by a major international museum of a contemporary Aboriginal artwork.