Ningura Napurrula is one of Australia’s most important and collectable Aboriginal artists. Born around 1938 at Watulka, south of Kiwirrkurra in the Gibson Desert, she was a senior Pintupi woman of Kintore and Kiwirrkurra.

Her husband, Yala Yala Gibbs Tjungurrayi, was a founding member of Papunya Tula Artists, the company at the heart of the desert art movement that began at Papunya in 1971. In the 1980s Ningura helped with his canvases at Kintore, and in the mid-1990s she was among the senior women of Kintore and Kiwirrkurra who began painting in their own right, joining the Kintore/Haasts Bluff women’s painting project in 1995 and Papunya Tula Artists in 1996.

Ningura developed a bold signature style of two-colour patterns, sometimes with added colour. Related to her husband’s work, her paintings tell of women’s lives, experiences and their place in the Dreaming. Many of her later works centre on Wirrulnga, a rockhole site closely connected with birth and women’s lives.

In 2006 she was one of only eight Aboriginal artists commissioned to create works for the ceilings and roof of the new Musée du quai Branly in Paris. Her first-floor ceiling, based on her painting of Wirrulnga, was the work she considered the pinnacle of her career.