Painted in Darwin in 1999
Karen Brown Gallery, Darwin
Private Collection, Perth, Western Australia
Bonhams, Aboriginal Art, Sydney, 28 June 2011, lot 31
The Dennis and Debra Scholl Collection, Miami

Nevada, Nevada Museum of Art, No Boundaries: Aboriginal Australian Contemporary Abstract Painting, 13 February to 13 May 2015, and additional venues:
Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, Portland, 20 June to 16 August 2015
Pérez Art Museum, Miami, 17 September 2015 to 3 January 2016
Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History, Detroit, 18 January to 15 May 2016
Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell University, New York, 9 June to 14 August 2016

Henry F. Skerritt, ed. et al, No Boundaries: Australian Aboriginal Contemporary Abstract Painting, Prestel Verlag, Munich-London-New York, 2014, p.63, p.69 (illus.)

Synthetic polymer paint on canvas, on stretcher, unframed. Bears Karen Brown gallery number KB0073 and PAMM label on reverse. Please not there is some minor rubbing and pigment loss near the upper left and right hand corners and lower left hand corner. There is a small scuff approximately 1cm long in the black dot approximately 10cm in from the lower left corner- could possibly be removed with cleaning. Another minor scuff on pale blue dot, lower centre near margin. Otherwise the work is in excellent condition overall with no visible evidence of repair or restoration.
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The Larrakia are salt-water people; their historic exclusion from their traditional land threatened to force them away from their life-source, the coasts on the Arafura Sea. In the first decades of the twentieth century Midpul’s father Imabul protested against the government’s intention to relocate the Larrakia inland.¹ While Midpul’s preferred background colour for his paintings is often white, he experimented with a range of primary and secondary hues. Blue, however, is one colour that emphasizes the Larrakia connection with the sea. In Untitled (Body Marks), 1999, the optical effect of vertical lines of white dots interwoven with a matrix of black spots against the blue ground suggests the sparkle of light of the surface of water, that in traditional Aboriginal art aesthetics alludes to the expression in paint of the presence of ancestral forces. WC

1 Emily McDaniel, ‘Prince of Wales (Midpul): “I make the marks”, in Henry F. Skerritt, ed. et al, No Boundaries: Australian Aboriginal Contemporary Abstract Painting, Prestel Verlag, Munich-London-New York, 2014, p.62, refers to an article in The Northern Standard in 1936 as quoting Imabul along these lines.