Painted in the East Kimberley, Western Australia in 1989 for Waringarri Arts
Coo-ee Aboriginal Emporium & Art Gallery, Sydney
Stefano Spaccapietra Collection, Switzerland

Sythetic polymer paint on canvas, unlined, stretched and framed in a box frame. Please note, there is minor cracking to the white dots throughout the work.The work appears to be in excellent condition with no visible signs of restoration or repair. Bears artist’s name, size and Waringarri Arts catalogue no. S359 on reverse
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One of Rover Thomas’s striking, intuitive compositions in his preferred format, the double-square, this untitled work was painted only six years after he commenced to paint publically. The bold, intuitive forms in combination with dotted lines that define the shapes and meander across the picture plane in Untitled, 1989, are suggestive of rivers and tracks, of hills and ‘reefs’ (Rover Thomas’s term for cliff-faces) seen in plan view and in profile simultaneously. The quality of the paint is characteristic of Rover Thomas’s paintings of the late 1980s, early 1990s: the artist would blend natural ochres and charcoal with binders made from the heated sap of a variety of plants and trees that, as in this case, soak into the raw cotton canvas to produce a translucent, luminous picture surface. In addition to the quality of the paint, the composition of Untitled, 1989, bears striking similarities to a number of his paintings from the period in the same format, including Gula Gula (Manking), 1989,¹ in the Janet Holmes à Court Collection, and Lake Argyle, 1986,² in the collection of the National Gallery of Australia. In the latter painting, a black sweeping form represents the Ord River that flows into the mass of the flooded valley of Lake Argyle. Another related painting in the national collection is The camp at Mistake Creek, 1990, from the Texas Downs Killings series.³

Rover Thomas was one of the main instigators of the Warmun painting movement in the East Kimberley that emerged from Gurirr Gurirr ceremony. The ceremony concerns the Aboriginal interpretation of the destruction of city of Darwin in 1974 by Cyclone Tracy. Its associated narrative and iconography was revealed to Rover in the subsequent months. However, as the owner of the ceremony, Rover Thomas did not paint any of the wooden panels that were carried by performers in the ceremony. He commenced painting publically in 1982 and by 1990 he, along with Trevor Nickolls (1949-2012), were the first Aboriginal artists to represent Australia at the Venice Biennale. In 1994 the National Gallery of Australia mounted a survey exhibition, Roads Cross, and in 2003 the Holmes à Court Gallery toured a retrospective exhibition, Rover Thomas: I want to paint, around Australia.⁴

WC

1 Gula Gula (Manking), 1989, is illustrated in Carrigan, B., Rover Thomas: I want to paint, Holmes à Court Gallery, Perth, 2003, catalogue number 19, pp.39 and 75

2 Lake Argyle, 1986, is illustrated in Thomas, R. with K. Akerman, M. Macha, W. Christensen and W. Caruana, Roads Cross: The paintings of Rover Thomas, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 1994, pp.17 and 58

3 ibid, pp.50 and 61.

4 See Carrigan, B., Rover Thomas: I want to paint, Holmes à Court Gallery, Perth, 2003.