Melbourne Art Fair 2024

For the 2024 Melbourne Art Fair, Yunupinju has made a series of Gurtha or depictions of the fires lit at the end of the dry season to burn off dead growth. As with Mawurndjul’s ‘Nawarramulmul’, we might say that this fire will briefly flare up and then die. We might even see the work as an allegory of Yunupinju’s own position at the end of this long tradition trying to keep it alive. But there is a brilliant twist. Yunupinju no longer works in the traditional rarrk style of painting on bark, but uses an angle grinder to carve patterns into street signs abandoned in the small town near where he lives. Thus, in a piece currently on exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria, a large metal street sign stating “ROAD CLOSED DUE TO CEREMONY” is read through a checkerboard of diamond incisions, or for the Fair he has made works in which “END OF ROAD” and “PREPARE TO STOP” are carved into to reveal the glittering silver beneath the flaky, chipped and dusty black and yellow of the words.

Rex Butler, 2024
 
Watch a video about Wanapati Yunupiŋu here.