Collection: Tartukula Artists

Tennant Creek’s Tartukula Artists employ bold colour and distort perspective to depict the rituals of everyday life. Carefully observed paintings are often recalled from time spent on Country. Remote Barkly hosts some of Australia’s largest cattle stations and station life is a common theme in the work of the Tartukula Artists, in such works minute details such as a brand of windmill or the mechanisms of a water pump are all intricately recorded.

The Tartukula Artists are often seen to employ a combination of traditional and contemporary Aboriginal visual language, rendering them significant innovators in the landscape of contemporary Australian art. Bright figurative scenes can be seen to embody aspects of the naïve art tradition while also incorporating traditional Aboriginal iconography; dot paintings feature on train carriages; the U shape is used to signify where a person is sitting and animal tracks frequently appear in works. This can be understood as an exchange between traditional and contemporary visual languages.