LONDON.- On 21 September 2016, Sotheby’s will stage its second London sale dedicated to the field of Aboriginal Art. The auction follows the outstanding success of the inaugural 2015 edition of the sale, the first of its kind to be held by a major auction house outside of Australia. Spanning more than 200 years, the artworks vary from exceptional early artefacts, to contemporary art by current stars such as Tracey Moffatt, Emily Kngwarreye and Walimpirrnga Tjapaltjarri.

This tightly curated auction of 92 lots includes major paintings from the Estate of Gabrielle Pizzi, whose collection has been exhibited in significant exhibition across the globe, including Dreamings at the Asia Society, New York, Aratjara at the Hayward Gallery, London, and Genesis and Genius at the Art Gallery of New South Wales. The sale also includes the Fiona Brockhoff Collection, the finest group of early Aboriginal sculpture ever to be offered at auction.

Tim Klingender, Senior Consultant, Australian Art to Sotheby's London, said “We are delighted to be offering so many exceptional artworks from some of the worlds most important collections, in what I anticipate will be a landmark auction for the Aboriginal Art field.”

SELECTED HIGHLIGHTS
Michael Nelson Tjakamarra (born 1948) Five Stories Synthetic polymer paint on canvas Painted at Papunya in October and November in 1984 £150,000-200,000
Consigned form the Gabrielle Pizzi Collection, Michael Nelson Tjakamarra’s painting, Five Stories, is among the most iconic images of modern Aboriginal art, and is possibly the most published and exhibited work by any indigenous Australian artist. It featured on the cover of the seminal exhibition Dreamings: The Art of Aboriginal Australia organised by the South Australian Museum and shown at the Asia Society Galleries in New York in 1988. The high profile of this exhibition and others introduced a new set of international collectors to Aboriginal art and initiated a debate as to its place in the continuum of contemporary art worldwide.

Michael Nelson Jagamara’s remarkable career highlights include being the designer of the major mosaic at the entrance to Australia’s Parliament House to him being the only indigenous artist ever invited to paint a BMW Art Car, putting him in the company of Jeff Koons, Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein. Born at Pikilyi (Vaughan Springs) west of Alice Springs in the lands of the Warlpiri peoples, this area is a crossroads for several major ancestral song lines that Tjakamarra has the inherited rights to paint, five of which are depicted in Five Stories. The pictorial innovations introduced by Tjakamarra create a shimmering surface, with visual effects reminiscent of ceremonial body painting, clouds and dappled light.

John Tjakamarra (circa 1937-2002) Untitled Synthetic Polymer paint on composition board Painted in the Papunya region in mid 1972 £40,000-60,000
The work of John Tjakamarra, who is also known as John Kipara, holds steadfastly to the idiom of recreating ritual body painting designs and ceremonial sand mosaics with their highly textured surfaces of wamulu (the impasto paint made from a combination of ochre colours and pulped vegetable matter) in visually tactile painted surfaces.

In this painting Tjakamarra depicts a man’s ritual body decoration where the central set of concentric circles represent the man, and the alternating bands of red ochre and white dots or feather down represent the body design. Untitled is one of the four rare ‘early Papunya boards’ in the auction that mark the beginning of the Western Desert ‘Dot’ Painting movement. The painting had not been seen in public from the time it was acquired by the collector from the Stuart Art Centre in Alice Springs in 1972 until it was shown in the landmark exhibition, Tjukurrtjanu: Origins of Western Desert art at the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, in 2011, and at the Musée du quai Branly, Paris, in 2012-13.

From the Fiona Brockhoff Collection
Fiona Brockhoff is a Melbourne based landscape designer of international renown, who has collected Australian Indigenous art at the most sophisticated level for more than 25 years. Her sculpture collection has focused on the rare figurative works of the 1950s and 1960s from the Tiwi Islands and Arnhem Land. The Brockhoff Collection is the finest group of early Aboriginal sculpture ever to be offered at auction.

Lots 29-39 comprise Tiwi Sculpture from the Fiona Brockhoff Collection. The Tiwi people of Bathurst and Melville Islands, separated from the mainland of Darwin in northern Australia by some thirty miles of treacherous waters, possess a unique culture and distinct art forms to the rest of Aboriginal Australia. Elaborate ceremonial cycles provide the occasion for the Tiwi to create a vast range of ritual objects and sculptural forms for which they are renowned.

Lots 40–46 comprise Mokuy Figures from the Fiona Brickhoff Collection. Naturalistic figure sculptures painted in ancestral or heraldic clan designs are a feature of the art of the Yolngu people of eastern Arnhem Land. The figures represent ancestral beings or spirits associated with deceased members of a clan. A number of these sculptures are referred to generically as ‘mokuy’. Mokuy is the ghost or sinister aspect of a deceased person that inhabits the vicinity of the burial ground, haunts the living and seeks to lay blame for the death.

Benedict Palmeiua Munkara Circa 1925- 1978 Untitled, Male and Female Figures of Purukapali and Bima Carved wood, ochre decoration Executed on Bathurst Island in the 1960s £10,000-15,000
Depicted here are Purukapali and his wife Bima, the main protagonists of the ancestral narrative that describes the coming of death among the Tiwi people of Bathurst and Melville Islands. Bima is attracted to Purukapali’s brother Tapara and while distracted her child Jinani is left to lie in the sun and dies. Enraged, Purukapali engages Tapara in a duel from which the latter escapes to become the moon, dying each month only to be reborn. Bima transforms into a curlew and wails in grief for her dead son. Heartbroken, Purukapali carries the body of his infant son out to sea and drowns.

Mick Namarari Tjapaltjarri (1926-1998) Kangaroo, Wallaby and Bird Dreaming at Manpinya, East of Kintore, 1989 Synthetic polymer paint on canvas £30,000-50,000
Consigned from the Luczo Family Collection California is a masterwork by the acclaimed contemporary desert painter Warlimpirrnga Tjapaltjarri. Warlimpirrnga Tjapaltjarri has travelled one of the most astonishing personal trajectories of any living artist, yet any turbulence that he has encountered is entirely encrypted within the seamless shimmering surfaces that he creates. Raised with no communication with the wider world, Warlimpirrnga and his family of nine individuals remained for two decades in total isolation at Marawa near Lake Mackay on the Northern Territory/Western Australian border. The silence was broken in 1984, when the family group moved south after recognising the smoke of hunting fires lit by their relatives, who had returned to their country after decades of exile in Papunya. The ‘New People’ were warmly embraced by waltja (extended family) at Kiwirrkurra, Australia’s most remote community, where their resilience and recent experience of traditional life was celebrated.

By 1989, Warlimpirrnga had mastered the portable art form instigated by senior Pintupi relatives at Papunya in 1971. He has subsequently built a stellar career, with representation at dOCUMENTA (13) in Kassel and a solo exhibition at Salon 94 Bowery in New York in 2015. New York Times critic Roberta Smith regarded Warlimpirrnga’s canvases as the best Desert art she has encountered, noting that ‘Mr. Tjapaltjarri’s lines accumulate into continuous surfaces that, however simply made, are never still or flat. They are intensely optical, but not Op: their handmade vitality avoids that style’s soulless surfaces and designs.’