Emily Kame Kngwarreye

COOEE ART | EMILY KNGWARREYE

Emily Kame Kngwarreye 1

Emily Kame Kngwarreye Cover (Front & Back) Image Emily Kame Kngwarreye | Anooralya Yam Dreaming screenprint | 106 x 77 cm Inside Front Cover Image Artist Emily Kame Kngwarreye painting Earth’s Creation I Image Credit: Fred Torres of Dacou Gallery Inside Back Cover Image Emily Kame Kngwarreye | Summer Business II | 1993 synthetic polymer on canvas | 150 x 90 cm

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Earth’s Creation I sold in 2017 by Cooee Art MarketPlace for $2.1 million. It holds two of the three highest prices ever achieved for an Australian Indigenous painting and has held the highest recorded price for a work by any Australian female artist since 2008

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Emily Kame Kngwarreye | Summer Business II | 1993 synthetic polymer on Belgian linen | 90 x 150 cm PROVENANCE Delmore Gallery, NT Cat No. 93D019 Private Collection, NSW

Emily Kame Kngwarreye Adrian Newstead OAM

Founding Director | Cooee Art Galler y

As a painter Emily was a bold, unselfconscious force unleashing colour and movement onto canvases. At their best, her works were sublime.

Her finest paintings are entirely intuitive, painted during furious sessions in which she never stepped back to look. Her forceful independent personality coupled with the strength she developed while

working with camels and labouring during her earlier life was clearly evident as she painted. She worked as if possessed, drawing long meandering lines and bashing out fields of dots with powerful movements, displaying her ability to use the most unlikely overlays of colours to create deeply luminous works. Like Pollock, she painted on the ground, crouching over the canvas until the work was complete. She was renowned for walking away from a canvas without even surveying the finished product, such was her assuredness about its content and meaning.

Those who knew her well describe her strong personality, ready to have a good time with a verve and energy defying her age. Deep down, her principle self-identity was as a contemporary artist with a deep commitment to her country.

She was uninterested in other artists’ work, except those depicting her own country. When asked about other painters, she would change the subject. Like her Anmatyerre clanswomen, Emily participated in ceremony (Awelye). In doing so,

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During a whirlwind painting career that lasted just eight years, octogenarian Emily Kame Kngwarreye became Aboriginal Australia’s most successful living artist and carved an enduring presence in the history of Australian art. By the time she passed away on September the 2nd 1996, her fame had achieved mythic status. The Sydney Morning Herald obituary reported the ‘Passing of a Home Grown Monet’. By this time comparisons with a number of great international artists, including Pollock, Kandinsky, Monet and Matisse, had become commonplace. Emily was an artistic superstar, the highest paid woman in the country, who created one of the most significant artistic legacies of our time.

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she was ‘promoting the health and well being of her community and demonstrating her ties with the land’. She loved getting her hands into the paint, using her fingers as much as her brush when attacking the canvas. Paintings produced in summer were usually more colourful and highly charged with energy than those done in the dry season, due to the keyed-up expectation of rain, the excitement of its arrival and the explosive flowering of the desert. According to Margo Neale, curator of her 1998 retrospective exhibition, ‘few artists have painted the country like she has, with an ability to penetrate its very soul’.

Born circa 1910 at Soakage Bore (Alhalkere) on the north-west boundary of Utopia, Emily first met white people as a young girl aged about nine. The adopted daughter of Jacob Jones, an important law man in the Alyawarre community, she spent her younger days as a camel driver and stock hand on pastoral properties at a time when most girls worked as domestics. Married twice, Emily lived with her family at Alalgura and later with her husband at Woodgreen Station. Having failed to conceive, she left her husband and moved to Soakage bore, one of 14 small encampments spread over Utopia’s 1800 square kilometres.

While Emily’s first experiences of serious painting were the making of boldly fluid marks on the greased-black skin of her countrywomen, her first attempts at making art outside of this ceremonial transaction between generations was the participation in batik workshops as early as 1977.

In 1980, the first exhibition of Utopia batiks was held in Alice Springs. At this time Don Holt, whose family owned Delmore Station, purchased some of Emily’s earliest batik silks and encountered early craft coordinators, Jenny Green and Julia Murray.

It was not until 1987 that Emily painted her first canvas for Rodney Gooch of the Central Australian

Aboriginal Media Association (CAAMA). A chance encounter between Christopher Hodges and a CAAMA representative in Sydney resulted in his opening Utopia Art Sydney in early 1989; this was the start of his ongoing relationship with the artists of the region. CAAMA’s ‘Summer Project 1988/9’ resulted in 81 completed works by Emily and others, which were catalogued and shown at the SH Ervin Gallery in Sydney. The success of these principally female artists snowballed from that time with CAAMA, handling over $1 million in sales for Utopia artists during the following year.

Emily found that painting with acrylic on canvas was more suited to her style than the laborious process of making batik.

Don Holt’s wife, Janet, formerly art coordinator and manager for Papunya Tula Artists between 1975 and 1997, responded to request from some of the Utopia women for art materials – shortly thereafter Emily painted her first work for the Holts. Her early style featured visible linear tracings following the tracks of the Kame (Yam) and animal prints, as in Emu Dreamings, with fields of fine dots partially obscuring symbolic elements and playing across the canvas’s surface. These were shown in two highly successful shows in Sydney during 1990, as well as the Abstraction show at the Art Gallery of New South Wales. In that same year she participated in the CAAMA/ Utopia artists-in-residence program at the ICA in Perth, and her work was exhibited for the first time with Gabrielle Pizzi in Melbourne. It is almost impossible to imagine the galvanising effect of Emily’s prodigious output at this early stage in her career. It gave rise to two vitally important phenomena in the history of Aboriginal art.

The first was the emergence of women’s art in the Eastern and Central deserts, which would eventually come to transcend men’s art, the dominant force at that time. The second was

In 1992, Emily was one of 12 Australian artists

to be awarded a two-year Creative Fellowship from the Australia Council, worth $55,000 per year. Subsequently, she announced that she had ‘finished painting’ and would produce no more pictures. Already, at this relatively early point of her eight-year career as a painter, it was noted that ‘she needed a break to escape the pressures placed on her by her own people (sic) and white people wanting to buy her paintings’. Rodney Gooch commented at the time that ‘to be a great artist in Aboriginal society is to be a great provider’ and noted that about 20 members of her immediate ‘family’ would benefit directly from her award and about 100 others indirectly. Already, appreciation of her art came from international quarters with major paintings included in important exhibitions which toured to Russia (1991), Japan (1992), Germany, the United Kingdom, and Denmark (1993) while others adorned chic apartments from Paris to Rome, and Madrid. Despite relatively few solo exhibitions in Australia, other than with Gabrielle Pizzi and Utopia Art Sydney, important Australian artists and collectors increasingly acclaimed her work. Amongst the most important galleries to show her work in Sydney at the time were the Hogarth Galleries, Coo-ee Aboriginal Art, and Barry Stern. While in Melbourne her paintings were shown by Flinders Lane Gallery, Alcaston House, Lauraine Diggins Fine Art and Aboriginal Gallery of Dreamings. It would be far from an exaggeration to say that, almost singlehandedly, Emily Kngwarreye enabled a large number of Aboriginal art galleries to weather the high interest rate driven recession of the early 1990s and ride it out in far better condition than their contemporary gallery counterparts. Her paintings, along with those of the far less prolific Rover Thomas, commanded prices unmatched by any others, unheard of prior to this time. Her success in the market in this economic period gave the initial impetus to contemporary galleries,

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the arrival of a new entrepreneurial sector in the Aboriginal arts industry, which enabled many galleries to source high quality art from outside of the art centre system. There were already a large number of individuals commissioning and sourcing works directly from her. Paul Walsh sourced paintings for Melbourne dealer Hank Ebes and his partner, at that time, Michael Hollows. Later, after moving to Alice Springs and opening his own gallery in Todd Mall, Hollows commissioned works directly. Tim Jennings built his Mbantua Gallery principally specialising in the work of the emerging Utopia artists and Emily’s paintings were always featured. Perhaps the most successful of all of the dealers who became involved in commissioning and marketing Emily’s work from 1990s onwards was Fred Torres, the son of her niece Barbara Weir. Torres, who went on to assist a number of female relatives to market their art successfully, took ‘auntie’ Emily and other family members to Adelaide in 1990 and sold their work to galleries in a number of capital cities. Another important source for Emily’s paintings was Alan Glaetser who ran the Utopia store and later worked for the Central Land Council. While these were the main players, they were by no means all, as once she had achieved notoriety there was an unending stream of buyers with blank canvases, keen to get a piece of the action. Emily could paint a number of paintings in a single day if everything was laid out, ready and waiting for her arrival. By 1992 her fine dotting and symbolic underpainting gave way to works in which symbols and tracks were increasingly concealed beneath a sea of dots until eventually they were no longer evident at all. She began using larger brushes to create lines of dots that ran across vibrantly coloured, haptic surfaces.

These works became progressively visually abstracted and ethereal.

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which had previously eschewed Aboriginal art, to compete with the specialist Aboriginal galleries for Emily and other artists, and to exploit what they portrayed as an ethical vacuum.

By the mid-1990s, Emily had developed a style of painting euphemistically referred to as ‘dump dump’ works, which she created by employing larger and larger brushes.A convenient supposition would be that she fell into this style due to the economic imperative of keeping up with market demand.This, however, discounts the artist’s genius.

With prodigious energy Emily now created wildly colourful canvases by double dipping brushes into pots of layered paint thereby creating floral impressions with alternately coloured variegated outlines. Despite her age, Emily’s physicality was evident as she painted. Often with a brush in each hand she simultaneously pounded them down onto the canvas spreading the bristles and leaving the coagulating paint around the neck of the brush to create depth and form. The runnels of dotted colour across the surfaces of her more abstracted works began to be more formally arranged in parallel lines and, although she created ‘line’ paintings as early as 1993, she began working in this style more intensely during the last two years of her life. Solid lines of colour, stark and unadorned, often painted on multiple panels, represented the body markings that were created during the ceremonial origins of her artistic practice. Formal compositions comprising these parallel lines eventually gave way to the meandering paths traced by the roots of the pencil yam as they forged their way through the desert sands. Arguably the most important of these works is the monumental Big Yam Dreaming 1995 (8 x 3m) donated by Don and Janet Holt to the National Gallery of Victoria. Painted entirely in white on a black ground, it has been described as the ‘perfect bridge between Aboriginal art and

contemporary international art’.

During 1996, the last year of her life, as a result of Allan Glaester’s ideologically motivated efforts to influence Central and Eastern desert painters back to using natural earth pigments as a medium, Emily produced a body of work in ochres in which she depicted Pencil Yams (Arlatyey) and their flowers. An exhibition of these was held at Lauraine Diggins Fine Art in Melbourne in the same year.

Despite Emily’s international acclaim and the vast fortune that she earned and dispensed to her clanspeople, it is still possible to visualise her sitting by the Arlparra Store, under the large bloodwood Eucalypts at the centre of the community. There she would camp and paint on red sandy earth under a bough shelter, dipping her brush into kerosene tin paint pots. Emily slept under the stars and lived in a most frugal manner. When money came in, it was quickly spent or given away.

She was completely indifferent to the trappings of wealth and fame, largely oblivious to the art of those international modernist masters whom she was constantly compared with. In her final series, created during the weeks preceding her death, Emily created a number of simple, stark colour-field paintings working with large flat brushes. They mark a most extraordinary end to a remarkable career and parallel the last works of Henri Matisse, yet another artist of whom she was unaware.

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Emily Kame Kngwarreye Image Credit | Greg Weight

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Emily Kame Kngwarreye | Anooralya Awelye | 1994 synthetic polymer on canvas | 151 x 90 cm PROVENANCE Delmore Gallery, NT Cat No. 94K030 Private Collection, NSW

PROVENANCE Delmore Gallery, NT Cat No. 96C186 Private Collection, NSW

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Emily Kame Kngwarreye | Anooralya Awelye | 1996 synthetic polymer on canvas | 151 x 90 cm

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Emily Kame Kngwarreye | My Country | 1994 synthetic polymer on Belgian linen | 120 x 90 cm PROVENANCE Delmore Gallery, NT Cat No. 94C020 Private Collection, NSW

PROVENANCE CAAMA, NT Utopia Art Sydney, NSW The Collection of John Wregg and Judith Alexander, NSW

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Emily Kame Kngwarreye | My Country | 1990 synthetic polymer on canvas | 122.5 x 91 cm

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Emily Kame Kngwarreye | Yam | 1995 synthetic polymer on Belgian linen | 127 x 100 cm

Emily Kame Kngwarreye | Yam | 1995 synthetic polymer on Belgian linen | 127 x 99 cm

PROVENANCE DACOU Gallery, Vic Private Collection, SA

PROVENANCE DACOU Gallery, Vic Private Collection, SA

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Emily Kame Kngwarreye | Anooralya Yam Dreaming limited edition screenprint | 77 x 106 cm

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Emily Kame Kngwarreye | Untitled synthetic polymer on canvas | 76 x 105 cm PROVENANCE Mulga Bore Artists, NT (Rodney Gooch) Utopia Art, Sydney, NSW Cat No. EK36 - 893 MBA The Collection of John Wregg and Judith Alexander, NSW

PROVENANCE Mbantua Gallery, NT Private Collection, NSW

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Emily Kame Kngwarreye | Alkahere | 1996 synthetic polymer on canvas | 123 x 90 cm

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Emily Kame Kngwarreye Image Credit | Tara Ebbs

Market Analysis a work of art by any Australian female until the same work sold in 2017 for $2,100,000, thereby doubling the former record. The second highest price paid for a work by Emily by the end of 2007 was the $463,000 for Spring Celebration 1991, which measured 130 x 230 cm, and had sold at Sotheby’s in 2003. This reflected the premium paid for major paintings from her early period.

Sales of Emily’s works slumped immediately following her death but grew steadily from the beginning of the new millennium. By 2004 her total sales at auction reached $2,072,538, due to Christies, Lawson Menzies, Shapiro, and Bonhams and Goodman all joining Sotheby’s with specialist auctions; in 2012, her total sales for the year had reached $1,055,998. This grew to $2,118,652 in 2015 and a whopping $3,477,394 in 2017. The prices of her better paintings have consistently risen since 2000, with the exception of 2005 when a glut of works were offered for sale at auction. Average prices rose from around $20,000 in 1997 to over $34,712 by the end of 2007 and, on the back of her Tokyo retrospective, to $35,381 by the end of the following year. It now sits at $43,971. Yet, of the 1272 individual paintings offered for sale through auction houses

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In the early 1990s, Emily Kngwarreye became the first Indigenous artist in Australia to break the $10,000 ceiling paid for paintings in the primary market. Paintings measuring up to 120 x 180 cm in size sold regularly in galleries for between $10,000 and $20,000, while those around 90 x 120 cm sold for $8,000-10,000. Following her death in 1996, Emily’s prices surged, stabilising again in the late 1990s, while curators and critics reappraised her work. Prior to 2004, Sotheby’s dominated sales of Kngwarreye’s work and, as would be expected, had offered them for sale at all of their Aboriginal art sales since their first specialist sale in 1994. By 2006 only one nonDelmore work was listed amongst her top ten Results, of which all but one had sold through Sotheby’s. In 2007, Lawson~Menzies sold Earth’s Creation 1995, for $1,056,000, more than double Kngwarreye’s previous record and, in doing so, set the new standard for a painting by any Indigenous artist. This replaced the previous record for any individual Aboriginal artwork, set at $778,750 in 2001 for Rover Thomas’s All That Big Rain Coming Down Topside 1991. It marked the first time an Indigenous Australian artwork had exceeded the million-dollar-mark at a public sale and this stood as the highest price ever paid for

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since her career began, the majority have been valued at between just $5,000 and $50,000. This has been due to both the large number of smaller works that she produced, and the premium paid for relatively rare major works created early in her career.

In an encouraging sign, her success rate has been consistently above 60% in recent years. It was 67% in 2016 and, though it fell to 60% in 2018, two new paintings entered her top 10 results when Summer Awelye II sold at Sotheby’s London for $547,641 in March and Earth’s Creation II achieved $294,545 at Menzies in November. She finished the year with average sales of $79,467 against her overall career average of $42,486. In 2019, 74% of all works sold for an average price of $99,254 on the back of two exceptional results at the first Sotheby’s auction in New York, both of which entered her ten highest prices. Summer Celebration, a magnificent 121 x 302 cm palimpsest sold for $863,544.00 while an untitled early Delmore work measuring 212 x 123 cm achieved $507,115.00.

It is now over twenty years since the artist’s death and enough time has elapsed for the story of her career and those who worked with her to have been thoroughly examined. There is no doubt that Emily Kngwarreye painted wonderful works for a variety of dealers. Most importantly, works produced for Fred Torres with Dacou Gallery provenance and those produced for Christopher Hodges of Utopia art in Sydney have been greatly undervalued in the market. The best of these works would seem to represent fantastic value, as would good paintings from a number of additional sources. Overall the market for high quality works by the artist remains strong despite the emergence of equally gestural painters from the Eastern and far Western deserts, whose

works sell at much lower prices. While early works will always fetch a premium over paintings of similar size from other periods, exceptional late career works are yet to be tested. These include the final series of 22 paintings completed immediately prior to her death. When these are finally released onto the market they will create a sensation.

Since Emily emerged as a major force in contemporary Aboriginal painting in the late 1980s, her international recognition and renown has shown no sign of abating. Her inclusion in the Venice Biennale and her retrospective exhibition have reinforced this since her death.

Her reputation was further advanced in 2008 with the landmark exhibition curated by Margo Neale of the National Museum of Australia which toured Osaka and Tokyo. That year, Emily finally drew level with Rover Thomas as the market’s leading artist. By the end of 2015 she had drawn so far ahead that she is unlikely to return to the field during our lifetimes, if ever.

The importance of her international retrospective cannot be overstated. It presented Emily Kngwarreye as one of the greatest international contemporary artists of the twentieth century.

Her work, Earth Creation I, was included in the Director’s exhibition at the Venice Biennale and will be included in the major exhibition Women in Abstraction at the Centre Pompidou in Paris in 2021. This alone should ensure that Emily’s best works will continue to be highly prized by Australian and international collectors and fetch premium prices far into the future.

PROVENANCE Contemporary Australian Visions, Vic Cooee Art, NSW

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Emily Kame Kngwarreye | Emily’s Country | 1992 synthetic polymer on Belgian linen | 120 x 90 cm

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Emily Kame Kngwarreye | Yam Dreaming| 1995 synthetic polymer on linen | 206 x 126 cm PROVENANCE Dacou Gallery, SA Private Collection, SA

PROVENANCE Dacou Gallery, SA Christie’s, Sydney, 23 August 2004, lot 250 Marlene Antico Fine Art, NSW Private Collection, NSW Private Collection, Canada Private Collection, NSW

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Emily Kame Kngwarreye | Arlatye | 1995 synthetic polymer on canvas | 120 x 92.5 cm

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Emily Kame Kngwarreye | Arlatyerre - Bush Potato Dreaming | 1995 synthetic polymer on Belgian linen | 122 x 91 cm PROVENANCE Outback Alive, NT Cat No. OA654 Private Collection, NSW Lawson-Menzies Aboriginal Fine Art, Sydney, Lot No. 15 Private Collection, Germany

PROVENANCE Delmore Gallery, NT Cat No. 92I167 Gallery Gondwana, NT Private Collection, NSW

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Emily Kame Kngwarreye | Spirit Desert III | 1992 synthetic polymer on canvas | 91 x 152 cm

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Emily Kame Kngwarreye | Untitled (Alalgura I) | 1992 synthetic polymer on Belgian linen | 120 x 151 cm PROVENANCE Delmore Gallery, NT Gallery Gabrielle Pizzi, Vic The Collection of Colin and Elizabeth Laverty, NSW Private Collection, NSW

EXHIBITIONS The Collectors Edition, August 2015, Cooee Art Gallery O Tempo Dos Sonhos: Out of the Dreaming, South American Touring Exhibition, 2016

Market Performance

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2000 - 2019

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Emily Kame Kngwarreye | Bush Potato Dreaming | 1991 synthetic polymer on canvas | 90 x 130 cm PROVENANCE Utopia Art, NT Outback Alive, NT Private Collection, Vic Lauraine Diggins Fine Art, Vic

PROVENANCE Mbantua, Alice Springs Cat No. MB1217 Private Collection, Vic Lauraine Diggins Fine Art, Vic

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Emily Kame Kngwarreye | Women’s Dreaming | 1993 synthetic polymer on canvas | 105 x 179 cm

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Emily Kame Kngwarreye | Body Paint | 1994 synthetic polymer on canvas | 51 x 41 cm Emily Kame Kngwarreye | Body Paint | 1994 synthetic polymer on canvas | 50 x 38.4 cm PROVENANCE Mulga Bore Artists, NT Utopia Art, Sydney, NSW Cat No. 5.894 MBA The Collection of John Wregg and Judith Alexander, NSW

PROVENANCE Studio One, ACT Delmore Gallery, NT Cooee Art, NSW

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Emily Kame Kngwarreye | Yam Dreaming (Red Dots) | 1995 limited edition linocut on paper | 76 x 57 cm

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Emily Kame Kngwarreye | Yam Dreaming | 1995 synthetic polymer on linen | 121.5 x 91 cm PROVENANCE Robert Steel Gallery, NY, USA Cat No. ITF-EK47 Private Collection, USA

PROVENANCE Dacou Gallery, NT Savah Gallery, NSW Private Collection, NSW

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Emily Kame Kngwarreye | Flower Dreaming | 1994 synthetic polymer on Belgian linen | 94 x 62 cm

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Emily Kame Kngwarreye | Awelye | 1996 synthetic polymer on canvas | 535 x 121 cm PROVENANCE Charmers Family, Macdonald Downs Private Collection, Sydney, NSW

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Emily Kame Kngwarreye | Awelye (Food Travels Dreaming) | 1991 synthetic polymer on canvas | 130.5 x 98 cm PROVENANCE Painted for Alan and Serena Glaetzer of Alice Springs Pirra Fine Arts, Vic

PROVENANCE Delmore Gallery, NT Cat No. 92E069 Private Collection, NT

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Emily Kame Kngwarreye | Untitled - Anooralya Awelye | 1992 synthetic polymer on canvas | 91 x 121 cm

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