Nyapanyapa Yunupingu (1945 – 20 October 2021) was an Australian Yolngu painter and printmaker who lived and worked in the community at Yirrkala, Arnhem Land, in the Northern Territory.
Due to this departure from tradition within her oeuvre, Yunupingu's work had varying receptions from within her community and the broader art world.
[1] She was the daughter of Yolŋu artist and cultural leader Munggurrawuy Yunupingu (c.1905–1979), who was involved with the Yirrkala bark petitions.
This is because she is deaf, doesn’t speak English, is otherwise not that verbal, doesn't belong to a culture which believes it is necessary to talk at length about art unless in regard to its sacred character, doesn't paint sacred art, does not have a sense of herself as an individual as distinct from her kinship group, does not have a sense of herself as an important artist, and does not have an interest in talking about herself.
[13] Nyapanyapa's abstraction in her mayilimiriw paintings may not seem to mean anything, but she was a highly ceremonial person and this work can still be tied to ideas of country and ancestral tradition.
Produced from 2009–2010, this series of paintings are solely focused on rhythmic mark-making, excluding colour from the narrative and instead creating works that were uninhibited in their spontaneous nature.
Throughout her career as an artist she transitioned from creating razor-incised carvings of animals and spirits, to linocut prints, to bark paintings, and recently multimedia projections.
[2] Within her mayilimiriw paintings, Yunupingu created a structure to work from by adding in circles, lines, and shapes which she then surrounded with crosshatching, using red, pink, and white earth pigments.
The criticism Yunupingu has faced about her "meaningless" paintings is relative, and some understand how she is an artist who is always tying her art back to ideas of country.