Portals to Place: Three Papunya Tula Artists

Portals to Place: Three Papunya Tula Artists brings together new, previously unseen works by Yukultji Napangati, Lorna Ward Napanangka, and John West Tjupurrula—three senior artists associated with the Papunya Tula movement. The exhibition situates their practices within the broader history of the Western Desert art movement, which emerged in the early 1970s and has since become one of the most internationally recognized Indigenous Australian art traditions. Through dense, undulating compositions of dots and lines, the artists translate ancestral narratives and sacred knowledge tied to specific sites within their Country. These works function as visual maps that encode spiritual, geographical, and ceremonial information. The shimmering surfaces and rhythmic mark-making evoke both landscape and cosmology, collapsing distinctions between abstraction and cartography. Presented by Edel Assanti in London, Portals to Place underscores the continued vitality of Papunya Tula painting and its capacity to articulate enduring relationships to land, memory, and intergenerational transmission. The exhibition runs through 16 May 2026 in London.