Painted in 2002 for Red Rock Art, Kununurra, Western Australia
Private Collection
John Kaldor AO, Sydney
Bonhams, Australian and International Fine Art; Selected Works from the Estate of Paddy Bedford; Aboriginal Art, Sydney, 21 November 2011, lot no. 6A
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.108, p.111 (illus.)

Synthetic polymer paint on linen, on stretcher, unframed. Bears Red Rock Art catalogue number KP1662 on reverse.The work is in excellent condition overall with no visible evidence of repair or restoration..
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The quintessence of Billy Thomas’s endeavor, the culmination of the continual encounter between disclosure and concealment is arguably best expressed in a painting such as Untitled, 2002, where practically all the graphic detail of the composition has been swept clean in a sea of white and rose ochre. This camouflage of paint appears as a logical visual conclusion in Thomas’s œuvre. Few paintings attain such transcendence, although a vision of overall ‘whiteness’ is present in two paintings of Waarlla from 1998 in the Laverty Collection.¹ A late painting made specifically for the Canning Stock Route project now in the collection of the National Museum of Australia,² is the visual antithesis, where the elements of the painting dissolve into a dark brown ochre. WC

1 See Laverty, C., et al, Beyond Sacred: Recent painting from Australia’s remote Aboriginal communities. The Collection of Colin and Elizabeth Laverty, Kleimeyer Industries, Melbourne, 2011, pp.236-7 (illus.)

2 See National Museum of Australia, Yiwarra Kuju: The Canning Stock Route, National Museum of Australia, Canberra, 2010, p.104 (illus.)