George Tjungurrayi
c. 1943–
Pintupi
Wala Wala, Gibson Desert, Western Australia
Papunya / Kintore
Pintupi Art / Western Desert Art
Papunya Tula Artists
George “Hairbrush” Tjungurrayi (born c. 1943) is one of the most important Pintupi artists of the contemporary era. The brother of Naata Nungurrayi, he began painting for Papunya Tula Artists in 1976 and developed one of the most distinctive styles in contemporary Western Desert Art.
George is best known for his extraordinary paintings of closely spaced parallel lines, which form undulating bands, nested squares and shimmering geometric patterns. Although increasingly abstract, his paintings represent Tingari ancestral journeys through the sandhills, claypans and ceremonial sites of his Pintupi Country, including Wala Wala, Kirrimalunya and Mamultjulkulnga.
During the late 1990s, George transformed the traditional visual language of Papunya Art into a remarkably individual form of linear abstraction. His paintings evoke both desert topography and the fine parallel grooves of traditional carved ceremonial objects.
Alongside Turkey Tolson Tjupurrula, Warlimpirrnga Tjapaltjarri and Patrick Tjungurrayi, he contributed to the international recognition of contemporary Aboriginal Art, while maintaining a profound connection to ancestral Country.
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Biography
George Tjungurrayi was born around 1943 near the claypan and soakwater of Wala Wala in the Gibson Desert of Western Australia. Wala Wala remained one of the most important places represented throughout his career, appearing repeatedly in his Tingari paintings and reflecting his enduring connection to Country.
Wala Wala was also depicted by Bobby West Tjupurrula, whose 1999 painting of the site records related Tingari ancestral Country. In Bobby West’s paintings of Palipalintja, the Tingari men travel east through Wala Wala before continuing towards Kiwirrkurra and Lake Mackay. Although both artists represented this interconnected ancestral geography, George’s tightly controlled parallel lines contrast with Bobby’s more directional and angular compositions.
Like many Pintupi people of his generation, George spent his early childhood living a traditional nomadic life before increasing contact with government settlements. As a young man he lived for a time at Yuendumu before moving to Papunya during the 1960s, where he worked as both a fencer and a butcher in the community kitchen.
George began painting around 1976 during the formative years of the Western Desert art movement. Later catalogue notes record that he took up painting after encouragement from the senior Pintupi artist Nosepeg Tjupurrula. Like many younger Pintupi painters, he learned by working alongside established artists including Yala Yala Gibbs Tjungurrayi and Shorty Lungkata Tjungurrayi, gradually developing both the technical skills and ceremonial knowledge required to become an independent artist.
These early years were effectively an apprenticeship. Large paintings were often produced collaboratively under the guidance of senior custodians, allowing younger artists to absorb both artistic practice and cultural knowledge. In 1981 George assisted on Uta Uta Tjangala‘s monumental Yumari, one of the landmark collaborative paintings of the Papunya movement.
During the 1970s, George moved between Papunya, Yayayi, Waruwiya and Mount Liebig, continuing to paint intermittently for Papunya Tula Artists. In the early 1980s, he settled at Kintore (Walungurru) with his wife Nanupu Nangala and their five children, following the return of many Pintupi families to their ancestral homelands. The move allowed him to work closer to the Country represented in his paintings, particularly the ancestral sites around Kiwirrkurra, Wala Wala and Lake Mackay.
George also passed his artistic knowledge to the next generation. His son Jack Tjapaltjarri began painting in 2004 under his father’s instruction, continuing the family’s involvement with Papunya Tula Artists. Together with George’s sisters, Naata Nungurrayi and Nancy Nungurrayi, the family represents several generations of Pintupi artistic and ceremonial knowledge.
George’s earliest paintings closely followed the established Pintupi style that had developed at Papunya. Tingari ancestral journeys were represented through concentric circles, connecting lines and dense fields of dotting, reflecting the visual language shared by many Papunya Tula artists during the late 1970s and 1980s. These works demonstrate a confident understanding of Pintupi ceremonial design, but they remain stylistically close to those of his contemporaries and do not yet reveal the distinctive linear abstraction that would later make him one of the movement’s most original painters.
From Concentric Circles to Ceremonial Geometry
George Tjungurrayi’s artistic development was gradual rather than revolutionary. His earliest paintings of the late 1970s and 1980s closely followed the established Pintupi style that had developed at Papunya, using concentric circles, connecting lines and dense dotting to represent Tingari sites and ancestral journeys.
During the late 1980s and early 1990s, however, he began shifting the emphasis of his compositions. Rather than organising paintings around concentric circles, he increasingly relied on repeated rectilinear forms built from closely spaced parallel lines. This was not the invention of a new visual language, but the adoption of an older one that had long existed within the ceremonial arts of the Western Desert.
The fine parallel lines in George’s paintings have strong visual parallels with the fluted carving found on traditional Western Desert wooden objects, including ceremonial Dance Boards and Aboriginal shields. Art historian Barry Patton, writing for the Art Gallery of South Australia, also identifies windblown sand ridges and traditional Tingari motifs as sources of meaning in George’s work. These visual relationships help explain his paintings, but the lines should not be understood simply as enlarged copies of designs carved into wooden objects.
This fundamentally altered the appearance of his work. Concentric circles gradually gave way to repeated square and rectilinear forms built from thousands of meticulously controlled brushstrokes. The paintings remained expressions of Tingari Tjukurrpa, but their visual emphasis shifted from mapping ceremonial sites towards rhythm, geometry and optical movement.
George’s achievement was to demonstrate that concentric circles and dotting represented only one expression of a much broader ceremonial design tradition. His paintings showed that the same Tingari knowledge could be expressed through the geometric language long associated with engraved ceremonial objects, expanding the visual vocabulary of Western Desert painting while remaining firmly grounded in Pintupi tradition.
The extraordinary precision of his technique became one of his defining achievements. Subtle variations in line spacing, width and direction create a gentle optical vibration across the canvas, producing paintings of remarkable rhythm and visual intensity. By bringing the rectilinear geometry of ceremonial objects into monumental acrylic painting, George created one of the most distinctive and immediately recognisable bodies of work in contemporary Aboriginal art.
George Tjungurrayi Painting Subjects
Nyuminga — The Dancing Women
One of George’s earliest documented paintings, The Dancing Women at Nyuminga (1976), depicts ancestral women visiting rocky outcrops where they gathered edible plants and bush fruits.
According to the National Museum of Australia, concentric circles in the painting represent a large cave, while yellow and white dots indicate particular plant foods. The ancestral women eventually became upright stones that remain at the site.
This early painting demonstrates that George’s subjects included women’s ancestral activities as well as the Tingari men’s journeys that came to dominate his later work.
Kirrimalunya — Tingari Men and Water Soakages
Kirrimalunya, north of Kiwirrkurra, was an important place in George’s father’s Country.
In his 2019 painting Kirrimalunya, George depicted the claypans and soakage-water sites used by Tingari men travelling towards Kaakuratintja (Lake Macdonald).
The ancestral narrative also concerns two young ngangkari, or traditional healers, who possessed healing abilities from childhood.
George explained that the lines in the painting represented the surrounding sandhills, while the blocks of colour represented water soakages.
Mamultjulkulnga — The Freshwater Swamp
Mamultjulkulnga, north of Lake Mackay, was another recurring subject in George’s paintings, particularly during the late 1990s and 2000s.
The site contains a freshwater swamp and claypans associated with Tingari ancestral journeys. According to accounts accompanying his paintings, the Tingari travelled south from Kiwirrkurra towards this place, shaping the surrounding sandhills, creeks and rocky formations.
George’s closely spaced linear designs evoke this landscape while maintaining their connection to the ancestral events associated with the site.
Recognition
George Tjungurrayi held his first solo exhibition in 1997 at Utopia Art Sydney. The following year The Age published a highly favourable review of his exhibition at Gallery Gabrielle Pizzi in Melbourne, recognising the originality and sophistication of his increasingly abstract paintings. By 2000 he had become one of Papunya Tula Artists’ most sought-after painters.
In 2018, George’s paintings were included in the 21st Biennale of Sydney, where his commanding linear compositions were presented to an international contemporary art audience. That same year, his work appeared in Western Desert Sublime: The Craig Edwards Gift to the ANU, alongside paintings by his sister Naata Nungurrayi, Ningura Napurrula, Nyurapayia Nampitjinpa and other leading Western Desert artists.
In 2020, FireWorks Gallery in Brisbane presented Linesmen, an exhibition bringing George together with Ronnie Tjampitjinpa and Michael Nelson Jagamara. The exhibition examined how all three artists developed bold linear compositions from earlier painting traditions while continuing to represent ancestral stories. George’s Tingari paintings were exhibited alongside Ronnie’s representations of men’s ceremonies and rain-related Dreamings.
The market continues to reflect the importance of this period. Many of George Tjungurrayi’s strongest auction results have been achieved by paintings produced between approximately 1996 and 2004, the years during which his mature linear style reached its greatest refinement. Important works from this period have consistently attracted strong competition from collectors and are widely regarded as the defining achievements of his career.
Today his paintings are represented in major public and private collections throughout Australia and overseas. More than any other Pintupi artist, George demonstrated that the ancient ceremonial language of the Western Desert could be transformed into a form of abstraction that is both unmistakably Indigenous and unmistakably contemporary.
Further Reading & Sources
George Tjungurrayi Publications
Johnson, Vivien. “George Tjungurrayi.” In Meridian: Focus on Contemporary Australian Art. Sydney: Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, 2002. (Dedicated chapter.)
George Tjungurrayi: Between the Lines. Exhibition catalogue. Sydney: Utopia Art Sydney, 2008. ISBN 9780958056144. (Major solo exhibition catalogue.)
Gallery Gabrielle Pizzi. George Tjungurrayi: Recent Paintings. Melbourne, 1998.
Books
Johnson, Vivien. Lives of the Papunya Tula Artists. Alice Springs: IAD Press.
Johnson, Vivien. Once Upon a Time in Papunya. Sydney: NewSouth Publishing.
Myers, Fred R. Painting Culture: The Making of an Aboriginal High Art. Durham: Duke University Press.
Perkins, Hetti & Fink, Hannah (eds.). Papunya Tula: Genesis and Genius. Sydney: Art Gallery of New South Wales, 2000.
Caruana, Wally. Aboriginal Art. London: Thames & Hudson.
Sutton, Peter (ed.). Dreamings: The Art of Aboriginal Australia.
McCulloch, Susan. Contemporary Aboriginal Art. Allen & Unwin, 1999. (Discusses George’s mature abstract style.)
Exhibition Catalogues and Museum Publications
Art Gallery of New South Wales. Papunya Tula: Genesis and Genius. Sydney, 2000.
Museum of Contemporary Art Australia. Meridian: Focus on Contemporary Australian Art. Sydney, 2002.
Bonito Oliva, Achille; Green, Charles; Pizzi, Gabrielle. Aborigena: Arte Australiana Contemporanea. Milan: Electa, 2001.
Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory. 12th Telstra National Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander Art Award.Darwin, 1995.
National Gallery of Victoria. Power of the Land: Masterpieces of Aboriginal Art.
Research Articles & Essays
Barry Patton. Collection essay on George Tjungurrayi, Art Gallery of South Australia.
Vivien Johnson. Essays on George Tjungurrayi in Meridian and Papunya Tula: Genesis and Genius.
Nicolas Rothwell. “Going to the Source.” The Australian, 20 April 2004.
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