Australian Indigenous Fine Art Auction | 20 October 2020

Australian Indigenous & Oceanic Fine Art AUCTION | 20 October 2020

Australian Indigenous Fine Art Australian Indigenous & Oceanic Fine Art Cooee Art AUCTION | 20MarketPlace October 2020 AUCTION | 20 October 2020

COOEE ART Mar ketPlace AUSTRALIAN INDIGENOUS FINE ART AUCTION

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COVER IMAGE | LOT #26 EMILY KAME KNGWARREYE My Country - Final Series, 1996 127 x 82 cm synthetic polymer paint on Belgian linen EST $400,000 - 600,000

PHOTO CREDITS PHOTOGRAPHER

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Lisa Musico 6 Cooee Archives 1, 2, 3, 44, 64 Adrian Newstead 21 Adrian Newstead 24 Neil McLeod COVER IMAGE | LOT #52 27 William MoraOLOODOODI Galleries 29 PATRICK TJUNGURRAYI Adam Knight 31 Puntujtalpa, 2005 Fred Torres Dacou Gallery 38 152 x 122 | 154 x 124 cm (framed) Tara Ebes polymer paint on Belgian 39 linen synthetic EST $10,000 - 15,000

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PHOTOGRAPHER

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Gallery Gondwana Greg Weight Gallerie Australis Neil McLeod Adam Knight Adrian Newstead Neil McLeod Adrian Newstead

47 61 69 74 77 78 79 91

INDEX ARTIST

LOT #

ARTIST

LOT #

Abie Kemarre Loy Anatjari Tjampitjinpa Artist Once Known Barbara Weir Benny Tjapaltjarri Bill Tjapaltjarri Whiskey Billy Joongoorra Thomas Billy Nolan Tjapangati Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri Cory Warkatu Surprise Donkeyman Lee Tjupurrula Dorothy Napangardi Dr George Tjapaltjarri Emily Kame Kngwarreye Emily Pwerle Eubena Nampitjin Fred Tjakamarra Freddie Timms Galya Pwerle Hector Jandanay Jack Britten Jimmy Baker Jimmy Donegan John Kipara Tjakamarra Johnny Warnangkula Tjupurrula Johnny Yungut Tjupurrula Jukuja Dolly Snell Kathleen Petyarre Kitty Kantilla Lorna Naparrula Fencer Malcolm Maloney Jagamarra Mick Namarari Tjapaltjarri Minnie Pwerle Molly Pwerle Morris Gibson Tjapaltjarri Nancy Ross Nungurrayi Narpula Scobie Napurrula

59 34, 100 19 52 106 4, 17 22 70 66 1 41 49 33 8, 24, 26, 30, 51, 53, 84, 85, 86, 97 57, 96 61 92 16 58 68 63 90 98 78 20, 93 46 110 3, 60 13 28, 88 75 74, 107 7, 27, 29, 50, 55, 87 56 38 10, 101 105

Ningura Napurrula Nyanyuma Napangardi Nyuju Stumpy Brown Nyurapayia Nampitjinpa (Mrs Bennett) Old Tutuma Tjapangati Paddy Bedford Paddy Japaljarri Stewart Paddy Tjapaltjarri Sims Paddy Wainburranga Fordham Patrick Oloodoodi Tjungurrayi Peggy Purvis Mpetyane Polly Ngal Queenie McKenzie Nakara Ronnie Tjampitjinpa Rover Joolama Thomas Sally Gabori (Mirdidingkingathi Juwarnda) Susie Napaltjarri Bootja Bootja Takariya Napaltjarri Tatali Nangala The Four Sisters - Minnie, Molly, Emily & Galya Pwerle Tim Leura Tjapaltjarri Timmy Payungka Tjapangati Tjapanangka, Long Tom Tjawina Porter Nampitjinpa Tjunkiya Napaltjarri & Wintjiya Napaltjarri Tommy Yannima Watson Trevor Nickolls Turkey Tolson Tjupurrula Walala Tjapaltjarri Walangkura Napanangka Warlimpirrnga Tjapaltjarri Willy Tjungurrayi Wintjiya Napaltjarri Yala Yala Gibbs Tjungurrayi Yalti Napangarti

48 79, 104 109 23, 82 14 18 89 94 69 37, 108 80 95 5, 64, 67 9 15, 65 2 91 36 11 54 39 77 45 102, 103 81 25, 83 6 21, 73 32 12, 62 31,40, 43, 47 76 99 42, 71, 72 35, 44

AUSTRALIAN INDIGENOUS FINE ART AUCTION

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AUCTION | Australian Indigenous Fine Art Auction Live and Online Tuesday 20 October 2020 | 7pm start

326 Oxford Street Paddington NSW 2021

Auction Viewing 8 - 19 October 2020 | 10-5pm Tuesday 20 October 2020 | 10-2pm

marketplace@cooeeart.com.au +61 2 9300 9533 auction.cooeeart.com.au

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ADRIAN NEWSTEAD OAM | Founding Director - Senior Specialist adrian@cooeeart.com.au | +61 412 126 645 Adrian Newstead OAM established Cooee Art in 1981 and has organised and curated more than 400 exhibitions of Indigenous art since that time. A former President of the Indigenous Art Trade Association and Director of Aboriginal Tourism Australia he became the Head of Aboriginal Art for Lawson~Menzies in 2003, and Managing Director of Menzies Art Brands until 2008. Adrian is an Aboriginal art consultant, dealer, author and art commentator, based in Bondi, NSW. He has more than 35 years experience working with Aboriginal and Australian Contemporary art.

MIRRI LEVEN | Executive Director mirri@cooeeart.com.au | +61 416 379 691 Having gained degrees in International Development and Fine Arts, and a Masters in Art Administration from the University of NSW College of Fine Art, Mirri undertook fieldwork in the Solomon Islands and India whilst acting as the international photo editor for a London based travel magazine. She joined Cooee Art in 2007 and was appointed the Gallery Manager in 2010. In 2013, she left Australia to take up a role as director of a contemporary art gallery in London. Mirri has been a director of Cooee Art since 2015. She plans its exhibition program and project development, and is a founder of its auction arm, the Cooee Art MarketPlace.

EMMA LENYSZYN | Auction Specialist emma@cooeeart.com.au | +61 400 822 546 Educated in Fine Art at RMIT, Emma joined Cooee Art in 2016 as Gallery Manager Paddington and is now the Auction Specialist for the bi-annual Cooee Art MarketPlace auctions. She has a long history of employment in the arts including working at international institutions, commercial galleries and private collections.

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Cooee Art draws on over 100 years combined experience specifically in Australian Indigenous art.

AUSTRALIA’S OLDEST INDIGENOUS ART SPECIALIST Market Leader, Specialist Knowledge, Proven Results

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COOEE ART MARKETPLACE AUCTION | 20 OCTOBER 2020 Welcome to this special Cooee Art MarketPlace Indigenous Fine Art offering for 2020. The sale will include 62 works from the collection of one of Aboriginal art’s greatest promoters and supporters, the incomparable owner of the Aboriginal Gallery of Deamings, Hank Ebes. The estimated value of the 107 artworks collected for this auction is $1,800,000 – 2,500,000.

Hank Ebes crashed into the burgeoning Indigenous art scene in Melbourne in the early 1990s. A former crop duster and commercial pilot, he started collecting Aboriginal art after flying his own plane to Alice Springs and buying 120 paintings on the spot from Don Holt at Delmore Downs, before falling out with the cattle station owner come art dealer. He went on to specialise in art from the Eastern Desert, employing at one time, three ‘field officers’ before providing Fred Torres at Dacou Gallery with the financial backing to hold workshops ‘on country’ with Torres’ mother Barbara Weir, grandmother Minnie Pwerle, and auntie Emily Kngwarreye. During one such workshop Emily painted her masterpiece Earth’s Creation I, which Cooee Art MarketPlace sold in 2017 for $2.1 million, the highest price ever achieved for the work of any Australian female artist.

During the inaugural conference in Alice Springs that established the powerful Aboriginal Art Association of Australia (then Art Trade) in 1997, Ebes bought 80 paintings from a delighted Daphne Williams at Papunya Tula, fuelling a feeding frenzy amongst dealers who spent more than $250,000 within the hour.

Other works worthy of note in this sale are the panoramic Emily’s Country (Lot 51), created with a thickly textured profusion of purple, yellow, pink and blue paint.This major 212 x 148 cm work, depicting the desert’s food sources after rain with a laser-like intensity, is estimated at $260,000-320,000; two strong paintings by Tommy Yanima Watson, including the major work Irika (Lot 83) measuring 301 x 182 cm and conservatively estimated at $80,000-120,000; a charming image of the Three Wise Men visiting Jesus at Warmun by Queenie Nakarra McKenzie (Lot 64), which is in the sale at $25,000-35,000; and two early paintings created by Rover Thomas on construction ply soon after the dawn of the Kimberley painting movement. These works by Rover Thomas were both exhibited at museums throughout Europe and Japan between 1996 and 2006, as part of the Nangara exhibition, and are illustrated in the impressive bound catalogues that accompanied this important exhibition.

We look forward to hearing from you or seeing you in person in the lead up to the auction. The quality of the artworks on offer is exceptional. You can discover a wealth of information on all of the major artists whose works are included in this catalogue, as well as detailed information about the content and subjects of the artworks, on our website: www.cooeeart. com.au/marketplace You can access the Cooee Art MarketPLace dedicated auction platform where you can bid live online, leave absentee bids or simply just watch the auction at: auction.cooeeart.com.au

The Ebes collection is vast. No less than 650 paintings by Emily Kngwarreye passed through his hands. They include works in every style during her 7-year painting career, including more than half of her amazing final series artworks painted in the last weeks of her life. He has hundreds more by Minnie Pwerle, including the first 300 works Minnie ever painted.

This sale includes works by Emily Kngwarreye and other Utopia artists, as well as 40 paintings depicting different sites and aspects of the Tingari Dreaming with examples by the Pintupi Nine, the last remnant group to abandon their nomadic lives in the Western Desert in 1984.

An essay about Hank Ebes’ 30-year involvement in Aboriginal art is printed on pages 16 and 17 of this catalogue.

Our cover lot is a highly desirable and rare Final Series work by Emily Kame Kngwarreye - only the second of the 24 works she created during the last weeks of her life to have ever been offered for public sale. Carrying a pre-sale estimate of $400,000-600,000, it is, in my own opinion, one of the crown jewels of Aboriginal art. Scattered throughout this catalogue are testimonials to Emily’s genius from some of the most highly respected curators in Australia.They attest to the power, beauty, and importance of this and other final series paintings.

Best regards, Adrian Newstead OAM

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LOT #1

CORY WARKATU SURPRISE (1929 - 2011) Pitill Jila, 2007 60 x 90 cm synthetic polymer paint on canvas PROVENANCE Mangkaja Arts, WA Cat. No. 232/07 Private Collection, NT EST $2,500 - 4,500

Cory Surprise was a highly regarded, award-winning contemporary artist from Fitzroy Crossing known for her uninhibited painting style.

Born at Tapu, in the Great Sandy Desert. She walked out of the bush as a young woman having already been inducted into the law.

As a result, she knew her country intimately, including all the places to find water, all the significant sites, and how to find food. She met and married the well known artist Peter Skipper and they moved to Fitzroy Crossing in the 1950s.

Cory first started painting at Karrayili Adult Education Centre in the early 1980s when in her 50s. Her paintings are all about her country, including jilji [sand hills], jumu [soak water], jila [permanent waterholes], and jiwari [rock holes], pamarr [hills and rock country], mangarri [vegetable food] and kuyu [meat].

This work depicts Jilji (sandhills) at her birthplace deep in the Great Sandy Desert.

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LOT #2

SALLY GABORI (MIRDIDINGKINGATHI JUWARNDA) (1924 - 2015) The Hunting Ground, 2005 120.5 x 91 cm synthetic polymer paint on canvas PROVENANCE Mornington Island Arts, Qld Cat. No. 557/C/SG/1005 The Harding Collection, Sydney, NSW

Sally Gabori first picked up a paintbrush in 2005, at 81 years of age. The Lardil people in the Kaiadilt community of equatorial Queensland had little exposure to fine art, or really any comparable form of mark-making, prior to that time. Traditional tools, objects, or bodies were scarcely painted. The only recorded art that related their stories was a group of drawings, made at the request of ethnologist Norman B Tindale during his expedition to Bentinck Island in 1960, now housed in the South Australian Museum.

Previously known as a weaver of traditional bags, baskets, and nets, Gabori became the first Kaiadilt person to paint. Within months, she developed both in confidence and technique and was producing four-and-a-half metre paintings crowded with hundreds of concentric circles.

EST $6,000 - 8,000

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LOT #3

KATHLEEN PETYARRE (1940 - 2018) Mountain Devil Lizard Dreaming, 2004 92 x 92 cm synthetic polymer paint on Belgian linen PROVENANCE Gallerie Australis, SA Cat. No. GAKP090447 Cicada Trading, Qld Signed Verso and accompanied by a certificate of authenticity from Gallerie Australis EST $3,000 - 5,000

Katheen Petyarre is best known for her finely wrought, intimate renditions of the vast landscapes in the Eastern Desert. These were created during the epic journeys of her Dreaming ancestor and totem, the tiny Thorny Devil Lizard, referred to as ‘that Old Woman Mountain Devil’.

This tiny desert creature is believed to have created the vast desert home of the Eastern Anmatjerre people by moving each grain of sand, grain by grain, since the dawn of time. Petyarre and her clanswomen believe that they are its descendants, and have therefore inherited the responsibility for caring and nurturing the vast landscape that she depicts so intimately and carefully in her paintings.

Petyarre’s process leading to these sumptuous paintings took years to perfect. At the centre of this painting is a sacred Women’s Dreaming site associated with the green pea (antweth). Depicted throughout the painting are seeds (ntang) of the pea, which are an important food for the “traditional healer” (ngangkar), and the Mountain Devil Lizard (Arnkerrth).

The elongated X-shape represents two of the artist’s Mountain Ancestors Dreaming paths.

The painting portrays the area scattered with seeds and the sandhills created by the Mountain Devil Lizard and swirling sandstorms as they moved across the country.

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LOT #4

BILL TJAPALTJARRI WHISKEY (c.1920 - 2008) Rockholes Near the Olgas, 2008 25 x 38 cm each | frame 27 x 40 cm each synthetic polymer paint on canvas board PROVENANCE Watiyawarnu Artists, Mount Leibig, NT Cat. No. 10-080007, 1007022 & 10-08005 Private Collection, NSW accompanied by a certificate of authenticity from Watiyawarnu Artists EST $ 4,000 - 6,000

Bill Whiskey’s bold bright painting style reflected his indomitable spirit. He did not begin painting on canvas until entering the last four years of his life at 84 years of age, by which time he was widely renowned as a powerful healer and keeper of sacred knowledge.

His paintings, the first to depict the major Dreaming story and the creation of major sites throughout his country, are imbued with authority and steeped in traditional knowledge.

His subjects included the mythic battle related in the Cockatoo Dreaming that occurred at his birthplace, Pirupa Alka (Rock holes near the Olgas - Kata Tjuta and Ayers Rock - Uluru). During the battle, white feathers were scattered about and the landscape became indented by the entangled combatants crashing to the ground repeatedly. Subterranean streams filled these impressions with water and a circular amphitheatre was created by the sweep of wings. Today, a large, central, glowing white rock signifies the fallen cockatoo, still sipping the life-giving water from the sacred pools.

Colourful blues, yellows, and reds, always tempered by cockatoowhite, represent the wildflowers that grow in profusion after rain.

In keeping with the depiction of Dreaming stories throughout the Western Desert, the mythic and numinous is inherent within the sacred geography.

In these paintings, water places such as Pirupa Akla are marked by sets of concentric circles, their dazzling presence representing their powerful life-giving significance rather than their actual size. The actions of the White Cockatoo and Crow ancestors are encrypted as dotted patches that reference topographic features associated with the Dreaming.

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LOT #5

QUEENIE MCKENZIE NAKARA (1930 - 1998) Texas Hills (Carboyd Ranges), 1995 76 x 61 cm natural earth pigments on canvas PROVENANCE Painted at Pensioner Unit Warmun Community, WA Neil McLeod Fine Art, Vic Private Collection, Vic Signed Verso EST $4,000 - 6,000

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Queenie McKenzie was born c.1930 at the Old Texas station, on the Ord River in the north-west of Western Australia. As a young girl, she cooked for the stockmen, tending and riding horses and journeying as they drove cattle across the vast pastoral region of the north.

In the 1970s, the establishment of the Warmun community drew her tribe together once more, becoming a cultural focal point within the Kimberley area. Queenie played a leading role in restoring her people’s culture and working toward a secure future. Involvement in community affairs led her to experiment with representational art as an educational tool in the local school, where she taught Gija language and cultural traditions. She was encouraged to paint her first artistic experiments by Rover Thomas, with whom she had worked in the stock camps for much of her life.

This painting demonstrates her strong love and attachment to country. Here, Queenie has painted the rocky hills on the edge of the desert plain in the country of her childhood and early working life near Old Texas Downs cattle station.

LOT #6

TREVOR NICKOLLS (1949 - 2012) Hippy Picnic, 2006 84 x 56 cm synthetic polymer paint on Belgian linen PROVENANCE Estate of the Artist, SA EST $5,500 - 6,500

A solid grounding in the theory of Western art put Trevor Nickolls in a unique position when, towards the end of his post-graduate degree, he had a chance encounter with Papunya artist Dinny Nolan.

The meeting left him feeling that it could be possible to synthesise an art style from techniques gleaned from both traditional Aboriginal and western culture. His appointment as an education officer the following year allowed Nickolls to travel, meeting artists and elders throughout Arnhem Land and seeing traditional rock paintings in situ. Nickolls was selected to represent Australia in the 1990 Venice Biennale.

This painting reflects an idyllically happy and peaceful scene referring back to life in the 1970’s, hence the title “Hippy Picnic”. It reflects the early days of Trevor Nickoll’s art career, when he went on picnics where he would also sketch. The Holden he owned in the early 1970’s is in the background. He has placed some of his regular iconic imagery into the painting, including the dilly bag, goanna, butterfly, the personified tree with uplifted arms, and the doves which he used as symbols of peace. The painting is richly painted with layers of paint and intricately painted textures.

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LOT #7

MINNIE PWERLE (1910 - 2006) Awelye Atnwengerrp, 2004 174 x 121 cm synthetic polymer paint on Belgian linen PROVENANCE Commissioned direct from the artist, Alice Springs, NT Cicada Trading, Qld Cat. No. CT10193MP accompanied by a certificate of authenticity from Cicada Trading EST $8,000 - 12,000

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The manner in which Minnie Pwerle created her works was the result of an urgency to reconnect to the past and keep the Dreaming a living reality. Painting after painting, she depicted the body designs applied to women’s breasts and limbs for the regular ceremonial revivification of her country.

These bold linear patterns of stripes and curves evoke the movement of the women as they dance during ceremony. After smearing their bodies with animal fat, they trace these designs onto their breasts, arms and thighs, singing as each woman takes her turn being ‘painted up’.Then, often by firelight, they dance in formation to ritual singing. The songs relate to the Dreamtime stories of ancestral travel, as well as plants, animals, and natural forces.

Awelye - Women’s Ceremony - demonstrates respect for the land. In performing these ceremonies, they ensure well-being and happiness within their community.

LOT #8

EMILY KAME KNGWARREYE (1910 - 1996) Untitled, 1993 90 x 120 cm synthetic polymer paint on Belgian linen PROVENANCE Delmore Gallery, NT Cat. No. 93K036 Barry Stern Gallery, NSW c.1996 Private Collection, NSW Private Collection, NSW Ebes Collection, Vic EST $40,000 - 60,000

Toward the end of 1991, women’s Awelye ceremonies were being held in Utopia and the surrounding region. Emily’s work became more expressionistic, with the graphic under-layer of linear tracings and animal prints no longer evident. A number of exceptional paintings, including this particular work, were produced between November 1991 and February 1992. December was overwhelmingly humid with hot northerly winds. The anticipation of rain and the ongoing ceremonial activity enlivened the spiritual atmosphere. In this painting, which can be viewed horizontally or vertically, radiant fields of yellow and pink dots which cluster and trace across the surface vary in hue and density. They celebrate the successful life cycle of kame, the finger yam, with its daisy-like flowers which form seeds for making damper.

If any single artist could be said to be the standard bearer for contemporary Indigenous painting, Emily must surely be the one.

It is impossible to dispute the fact that, at their best, the paintings of Emily Kame Kngwarreye place her in the highest league of international artists of her time.

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THE EBES COLLECTION Perhaps Australia is just too small and parochial for the larger than life mercurial Hank Ebes.

A visit to his converted factory in a back street in Cheltenham, Melbourne is an unforgettable experience. The largest individual artwork is The Emily Wall, consisting of 53 panels spread glowingly across 15 metres in width and 5 metres high. He offered to gift his amazing collection of 243 Emily Kngwarreye paintings to both the Federal and Victorian state governments if they would put the Emily Wall on permanent display, an offer they declined. Due to his personal friendships in high places such as the Directors of the van Gogh Museum and the Rijksmuseum, who had both bought Aboriginal art from Ebes it formerly hung in Amsterdam’s oldest building, the Oude Kerk, built circa 1213.

THE EBES COLLECTION

A meeting with Ebes, who is only ever seen in red patent leather shoes, can be a surreal experience. The 78-year-old, who once declared brazenly “If Emily had been born in the 1800s she would have invented abstraction!’’, is as energetic and opinionated as ever in spite of his age and a quadruple coronary bypass.

While discussing art history and politics, we roamed around the former factory turned home, and passed Chinese jade burial suits and pottery, meteorites, opalized dinosaur skeletons, Hawker Hunter T7 airplane and Rotorway helicopter, an impressive collection of seminal early 1970s Western Desert paintings, ancient printing presses, rare manuscripts and books. The priceless objects seemed endless.

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Mirri and I sat with Ebes, perched above the jet airplane flanked by the ‘Emily Wall’ on one side and a large mist-filled Japanese garden on the other. “Emily’s art deserves it”, he insisted. “She was Australia’s greatest contemporary artist.

COOEE ART MARKETPLACE

Europe is covered in museums dedicated to individual painters. Why not a gallery solely dedicated to our greatest artist.”

canny decision resulting in a $2.4 million windfall. These two works reign supreme amongst all Aboriginal art sales.

Turned on to Aboriginal art along with his daughter Tara, he crashed into the burgeoning Indigenous art scene in Melbourne in the early 1990s. As Gabrielle Pizzi and Beverley Knight had the jump on him, having signed up Papunya Tula Artists and Emily Kngwarreye, he flew his own plane to Alice Springs and bought 120 paintings on the spot from Don Holt of Delmore Downs, before falling out with the cattle station owner come art dealer who lived on the adjacent property to Emily’s homeland on Utopia Station.

Closely related to Emily Kngwarreye, Torres and his family supplied Ebes with many of the 650 Emily’s that have passed through his hands. They include works in every style created by her during her 7-year painting career, including more than half of the amazing final series of 24 canvases, one of which featured on the cover of her Japanese retrospective exhibition curated by Margo Neale of the National Museum of Australia, which was shown in Osaka and Tokyo in 2008 and at the NMA in 2009.

During the inaugural conference in Alice Springs that established the powerful Aboriginal Art Association of Australia (The then Art Trade), Ebes famously bought 80 paintings from a delighted Daphne Williams at Papunya Tula after scattering canvasses all over the floor.

This resulted in a feeding frenzy amongst dealers. By the time they left an hour later, Daphne had taken more than $250,000.

It seemed that nothing would prevent Ebes’s irrepressible nature expressing itself.

He went on to employ three ‘field officers’, until he met the influential trio of Barbara Weir, her son Fred Torres and her mother Minnie Pwerle, providing the financial backing to hold workshops en plein air, out ‘on country’ in the Eastern Desert. During one such workshop Emily painted her masterpiece Earth’s Creation I which holds the highest price ever achieved for the work of any Australian female artist at 2.1 million sold

by Cooee Art MarketPlace in 2017. The hammer price ($2 million) equalled the record Ebes set when Sotheby’s sold his magnificent Walurkulong by Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri ($2.4 million including buyers premium) in 2007. He’d originally bought the painting for $39,600 at a Leonard Joel sale in 1996 on behalf of the American collector Richard Kelton, but he changed his mind and added the painting to his own collection. A

Though unhappy that his own plans for an Aboriginal art tour in Japan had been forestalled by the National Museum, Ebes agreed to include his most important final series piece, a marvellous work in grey wash – it featured on the front cover of the extensive Japanese catalogue.

Ebe’s had won Neale’s grudging respect after promoting Aboriginal art through 15 years of touring a 360-work collection he called Nangara across the United States and Europe, backed by an informative catalogue. Works from the collection were included in stand-alone exhibitions, and curated Museum shows, at venues in Belgium, Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands, Japan and the USA. Ebes arrived in Australia as a Dutch migrant in 1962. A former crop-dusting pilot he initially hoped to open a printing museum. He was running an antiqueprint shop in Bourke Street Melbourne, when Bob Edwards, walked in and introduced himself as the new director of the Melbourne Museum. Edwards offered him an honorary job as curator of printing history and technology, which he accepted.

Their friendship proved invaluable over the following decades as Edwards established Art Exhibitions Australia and Ebes secured many of the worlds most prestigious venues for his touring Aboriginal art exhibition, Nangara. He ‘fell in love’ with Aboriginal art when the print business fell into a hole in the 1987 recession.

Over the following years, Ebes became a polarising figure in Aboriginal art. He had no time for those ‘elitists’ who had developed strong alliances with curators in many institutions. He heard numerous complaints about people talking behind his back, but, he says, “I have never heard a single Aboriginal artist or family member say I did the wrong thing by them. And that is all that’s important to me.”

When commercial competitors cast accusations about fake works purporting to have been created by Rover Thomas, Ebes took advantage of Thomas’ visit to Melbourne and arranged for him to personally examine his collection. This resulted in a 2-hour video in which Rover recounts the creation of the paintings and provides further information on the sites depicted.

Of the hundreds of early Central and Western Desert paintings in his collection Ebes proclaimed as early as 1998, “These pictures show the beginnings of an art movement that is becoming more and more famous across the globe. They are the Renoirs and van Goghs of Australia and we are allowing them to leave the country without recognising their importance”. It is indeed fortunate that both Clifford Possum’s Warlurkulong and Emily Kngwarreye’s Earth’s Creation I, both major works with which Ebes is intimately associated, will remain in Australia permanently.

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LOT #9

LOT #10

RONNIE TJAMPITJINPA (c.1943 - )

NANCY ROSS NUNGURRAYI (1935 - 2009)

Kapi Tjukurrpa (Water Dreaming at Kalipinypa), 1995

Tingari Dreaming Cycle, 2004

61 x 91.5 cm synthetic polymer paint on Belgian linen

84 x 84 cm synthetic polymer paint on Belgian linen

PROVENANCE Field Collected by Paul Walsh, NT Cat. No. 050195RT Aboriginal Gallery of Dreamings, Vic Cat. No. 4420 Hank Ebes Collection, Vic

PROVENANCE Yanda Art, NT Cat. No. NR200404 Aboriginal Gallery of Dreamings, Vic Cat. No. 9928 Hank Ebes Collection, Vic

accompanied by a certificate booklet from Aboriginal Gallery of Dreamings

accompanied by a certificate booklet from Aboriginal Gallery of Dreamings and image of the artist creating the artwork

EST $1,800 - 2,500

EST $3,000 - 4,000

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LOT #11

LOT #12

TATALI NANGALA (c.1928 - 2000)

WALANGKURA NAPANANGKA (c.1946 - 2014)

Women’s Dreaming at Tika Tika, 1998

Women’s Dreaming at Marrapinti, 1998

54.5 x 61 cm synthetic polymer paint on Belgian linen

91 x 90 cm synthetic polymer paint on Belgian linen

PROVENANCE Papunya Tula Artists, NT Cat. No. TN980386 Aboriginal Gallery of Dreamings, Vic Cat. No. 7136 Hank Ebes Collection, Vic

PROVENANCE Papunya Tula Artists, NT Cat. No. WN980793 Aboriginal Gallery of Dreamings, Vic Cat. No. 7327 Hank Ebes Collection, Vic

accompanied by a certificate from Papuny Tula Artists and a booklet from Aboriginal Gallery of Dreamings

accompanied by an original certificate from Papunya Tula Artists and a booklet from Aboriginal Gallery of Dreamings

EST $2,000 - 2,200

EST $3,000 - 5,000

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LOT #13

KITTY KANTILLA (c.1928 - 2003) Jilamara, 2000 56 x 75 cm | frame 74 x 94 cm natural earth pigments on paper PROVENANCE Jilamara Arts, Melville Island, NT Aboriginal and Pacific Art Gallery, NSW Cat. No KKP0050 Idris Murphy Collection, NSW EST $3,500 - 6,500

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Kitty Kantilla’s art, and indeed all Tiwi art, is informed by the ornate body painting of the Pukumani ceremony. What makes the art of Kitty Kantilla and those of her generation so inherently important is that the meaning of these designs, characterised by abstract patterns made up of dots and lines, has been largely lost since the missionary era. She was amongst the very last who inherited these designs intact from her father.

The roots of Kitty’s art, regardless of medium, were always tied to the fundamental Tiwi creation story. Bima, the wife of Purukapali, makes love to her brother-in-law Tarpara while her son Jinani is left lying under a tree in the sun and dies of exposure. Purukapali becomes enraged and after his wife is transformed into a night curlew he begins an elaborate mourning ceremony for his son. This was the first Pukumani (mortuary) ceremony, and tells how death first came to the Tiwi Islands.

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TINGARI LAW PAINTING The Tingari creator beings travelled over vast areas of the Western Desert, performing rituals and creating the country accompanied by young initiates to whom they provided instruction in the ritual and law of the region.

Stopping and creating specific sites on their journey, they gave rise to all the features of the surrounding environment and the animals and plants that are found there. Their adventures are enshrined in numerous song-myth cycles, which stretch to thousands of stanzas.

During instruction from the most highly initiated and revered elders, young initiates are provided with countless topographical details that assist them and their nomadic bands to navigate and survive in the far reaches of the arid Western Desert.

TINGARI LAW PAINTING

Pintupi artists have painted representations of Tingari sites and Tingari Law as it applies to their country since the genesis of the Western Desert painting movement at Papunya in the early 1970s. In doing so they borrowed on the ancient designs used to depict country, as seen on petroglyphs, ceremonial ground designs and pre-contact ritual objects.

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The Ebes collection contains works by many of the artists who were amogst the first to paint. They include Anatjari Tjampitjinpa, Yala Yala Gibbs, Turkey Tolson, John Kipara Tjakamarra, Anatjari Tjakamarra, Mick Namarari, Uta Uta Tjangala, Johny Yungut, Johnny Warangkula and Old Tutuma Tjapangati, all of whom were collected by welfare patrols in the 1950s and 1960s and brought in from their desert homelands to Haasts Bluff and Papunya. After initially painting at Papunya, they were among those who made the Pintupi exodus from Papunya during the 1970s and return to their homelands adjacent to the newly constructed communities of Kintore and Kiwirrkura.

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During the 1980s these artists painted at their outstations, creating songline paintings - cartographic works linking sacred sites through the use of interconnected dots, lines and circles. Later, a handful of artists initiated a move toward contemporary abstraction through a return to keyed men’s designs formerly carved and

incised into ceremonial objects. Foremost amongst them were George Ward Tjungurrayi, Timmy Payungka, Ronnie Tjampitjinpa, George Tjungurrayi, and Willie Tjugurrayi. These artists achieved a sense mystery and numinosity through vibratory optically abstract paintings. Still others developed a singular personal aesthetic such as Peg Leg Tjampitjinpa, and Patrick Tjungurrayi, who left the desert for Balgo Hills but moved to Kiwirrkura late in life to join his relatives. Soon after the nine remnant Pintupi, hailed as the ‘Lost Tribe’ arrived in Kiwirrkura in 1984 and saw Europeans for the very first time, they, too, became painters in the Tingari tradition. They include Warlimpirrnga, his brothers Walala, and Thomas Tjapaltjarri and his sisters Yalti,Yikultji and Takariya.

As Aboriginal people gain seniority by participating in a series of rituals through their life, deep knowledge of a secret/ sacred nature is restricted to senior men of high degree. Public versions, which do not disclose deep esoteric and philosophical information, are related in the public domain however.

RELATED ARTWORKS 34, 100 106 70 41 33 78 46 38 10 48 79, 104 14 37, 108 9 77 103 73 32 31, 43 76 42, 71, 72

Anatjari Tjampitjinpa Benny Tjapaltjarri Billy Nolan Tjapangati Donkeyman Lee Tjupurrula Dr George Tjapaltjarri John Kipara Tjakamarra Johnny Yungut Tjupurrula Morris Gibson Tjapaltjarri Nancy Ross Nungurrayi Ningura Napurrula Nyanyuma Napangardi Old Tutuma Tjapangati Patrick Oloodoodi Tjungurrayi Ronnie Tjampitjinpa Timmy Payungka Tjapangati Tjawina Porter Nampitjinpa Turkey Tolson Tjupurrula Walala Tjapaltjarri Warlimpirrnga Tjapaltjarri Willy Tjungurrayi Yala Yala Gibbs Tjungurrayi

LOT #14

OLD TUTUMA TJAPANGATI (c.1915 - 1987) Untitled (Tingari Design), 1977 60 x 115 cm each | frame 61 x 120 cm synthetic polymer paint on composition board PROVENANCE Private Collection, Vic Sotheby’s Australia, Fine Aboriginal and Contemporary Art, Melbourne, June 1996, lots 226 and 227, (illustrated) Private Collection, Vic Sotheby’s Australia, Important Aboriginal Art, Melbourne, June 2011, Lot No. 21 Ebes Collection, Vic Cat. No. 5829 LITERATURE Cf. For a related, stylistically similar work see G. Bardon and J. Bardon Papunya, A Place Made After the Story, The Miegunyah Press,2004, p419 EST $35,000 - 45,000

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LOT #15

ROVER JOOLAMA THOMAS (1926 - 1998) Baragu Country, 1985 60 x 120 cm | frame 77 x 137.5 cm natural earth pigments on composition board PROVENANCE Field Collected in Turkey Creek, c.1986 Kimberley Art, Vic Cat. No. K19 Aboriginal Gallery of Dreamings, Vic Ebes Collection, Vic EXHIBITED Nangara: The Australian Aboriginal Art Exhibition from the Ebes Collection, Stichting Sint-jan, Brugge, Belgium, 1996 The Australian Aboriginal Art Exhibition, Hokkaido Asahikawa Museum of Art, Asahikawa, Japan; Tochigi Prefectual Museum of Fine Arts, Utsunomiya, Japan; Iwaki City Art Museum, Iwaki, Japan, 2001; Shimonoseki Prefectural Art Museum, Japan, 2001 Dreamtime - Aboriginal Art from the Ebes Collection, Arken Museum of Modern Art, Ishoj, Copenhagen, Denmark, 2006. (10th Anniversary Exhibition) LITERATURE Hank Ebes (ed.), Nangara: The Australian Aboriginal Art Exhibition from the Ebes Collection, Melbourne: The Aboriginal Gallery of Dreamings, 1996, Cat. No.105 and 112 Hank Ebes (ed.), The Australian Aboriginal Art Exhibition, Japan: The Yomiuri Shimbun, 2001, Cat. No 43 and 45 page 51.

Cf. For a similar painting of the same subject see Deutscher & Hackett, Important Australian & International Fine Art, Melbourne, 15/07/2020, Lot No. 76 EST $70,000 - 90,000

Rover Thomas was born in Walmatjarri-Kukaja country near Well 33 on the Canning Stock Route. He lived a traditional bush life until he was taken to Billiluna Station at 11 years of age, where he was initiated after his mother’s death.

This work was painted c.1984, early in Rover Thomas’ public painting career. That year he created a number of planar, map-like paintings, referring to sites and pathways of ancestral or historical significance and his own travels during his days as a drover on cattle stations in the region.

Baragu Country is an aerial view of the landscape at Lake Gregory, now known by its Walmajarri name Paruku, on the borders of the Great Sandy Desert and Tanami regions, 200 kilometres south of the township of Halls Creek in Western Australia. This beautiful wetland region is a haven for birds and other animals. It includes an extensive lake system, the only one in the region with a reliable source of fresh water. Primarily sourced from Sturt Creek which flows into Lake Gregory after travelling some 800 kilometres north-east across the border in the Northern Territory, it is an important site for the local Gidja and Kukatja people. It is believed to have been formed when a star fell from the sky into the lake and transformed itself into a man.

A breeding ground for budgerigars, Lake Gregory is also the home of the Billiluna Rainbow Snake.

In August 2001, the High Court of Australia formally recognised native title over this area of the Kimberley. The handover ceremony was conducted on the shores of Baragu, symbolising the significance of the place depicted in this important painting to local Aboriginal people.

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LOT #16

FREDDIE TIMMS (1946 - 2017) Woondawoon - Charlie Bight, 2000 100 x 80 cm natural earth pigments on Belgian linen PROVENANCE Jirrawun Arts,WA Cat. No. FT 4 2000-105 Private Collection, NSW EST $7,000 - 9,000

Freddie Timms began painting in 1986, inspired by the elder artists already painting at Frog Hollow, a small outstation attached to the community at Warmun, Turkey Creek. Born at Police Hole c.1946, he followed in his father’s footsteps, following the stockman life at Lissadell Station. At the age of twenty, he set out to explore and work on other stations. It was during this time that he met and worked alongside Rover Thomas, who was to have a lasting influence on him. In 1985, he left Lissadell once more to settle at the new community established at Warmun where he worked as a gardener at the Argyle Mine.

In a career that spanned more than 20 years, Freddie Timms became known for aerial map-like visions of country that are less concerned with ancestral associations as with tracing the responses and refuges of the Gija people as they encountered the ruthlessness and brutality of colonisation.

His was a unique Gija perspective on the history of white interaction with his people. It is hard to think of another who expressed more poignantly through their art the sense of longing and the abiding loss that comes from the separation from the land that embodies one’s spiritual home.

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LOT #17

BILL TJAPALTJARRI WHISKEY (c.1920 - 2008) Rockholes and Country near the Olga’s, 2007 212 x 97 cm synthetic polymer paint on Belgian linen PROVENANCE Watiyawarnu Artists, Mount Leibig, NT Cat. No 81-06118 High on Art, Melbourne Vic Cat. No HOA0694 Dr Paul Sutherland Collection, NSW Bears artist’s name, title, dimensions, and Watiyawarnu Artists’ Cat No. verso EST $25,000 - 35,000

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Bill Whiskey did not begin painting on canvas until entering the last four years of his life at 84 years of age, by which time he was widely renowned as a powerful healer and keeper of sacred knowledge. His paintings are imbued with authority and steeped in tradition.

This painting depicts the mythic battle related in the Cockatoo Dreaming that occurred at his birthplace, Pirupa Alka near Uluru.

During the battle, white feathers were scattered about the landscape which was indented when the entangled combatants crashed into the ground repeatedly. Subterranean streams filled these impressions with water and a circular amphitheatre was created by the sweep of wings. Today, a large, central, glowing white rock signifies the fallen cockatoo, still sipping the life-giving water from the sacred pools. In keeping with the depiction of Dreaming stories throughout the Western Desert, the mythic and numinous is inherent within the sacred geography.

In this painting, water places such as Pirupa Akla are marked by sets of concentric circles, their dazzling presence representing their powerful life-giving significance rather than their actual size. The actions of the White Cockatoo and Crow ancestors are encrypted as dotted patches that reference topographic features associated with the Dreaming.

LOT #18

PADDY BEDFORD (1922 - 2007) Untitled, 1998 73 x 59 cm natural earth pigments on canvas PROVENANCE Neil McLeod Fine Art,Vic Cat. No. NM4014 Aboriginal Gallery of Dreamings,Vic Cat. No. 12398 Ebes Collection,Vic accompanied by a certificate booklet from Aboriginal Gallery of Dreamings and photos of the artist creating the artwork EST $6,000 - 10,000 Characteristic of Paddy Bedford’s painting style are richly ochred surfaces with minimal arrangements of circular shapes delineated by white dots. Though important Dreamings such as the Emu, Turkey, and Cockatoo are present in many of his works, like the narratives of his family history, they are not depicted in any figurative form.

Paddy Bedford, an enigmatic octogenarian, stood out as a uniquely talented artist. He was already in his 77th year when he painted his first works, of which this was one of his earliest. He was photographed during its creation whist staying with his friend Jack Dale in Derby in 1998.

Paddy went on to achieve great renown as an artist and was amongst the few selected to contribute to the permanent installation at the Musee du Quai Branly in Paris. During his lifetime, he was honoured with the unprecedented recognition of a retrospective exhibition and a major catalogue by the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney in 2007, which toured nationally.

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LOT #19

LOT #20

ARTIST ONCE KNOWN

JOHNNY WARANGKULA TJUPURRULA (c.1932 - 2001)

Root Plant, 1975

Women’s Dreaming, 1975

62.5 x 75 cm | frame 65 x 78 cm synthetic polymer paint on composition board

45.5 x 61 cm | frame 49 x 64.5 cm synthetic polymer paint on canvas board

PROVENANCE Purchased directly from Peter Fannin when the owner was designing Aboriginal Housing in Papunya in 1975 Private Collection, Papua New Guinea

PROVENANCE Purchased directly from Peter Fannin when the owner was designing Aboriginal Housing in Papunya in 1975 Private Collection, Papua New Guinea

title written verso

artist name and title verso

EXHIBITED Big Country: Australian Aboriginal Art Coast to Coast, Jeffrey Moose Gallery Seattle USA, June - September 2012

EST $3,000 - 5,000

EST $2,000 - 2,500

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LOT #21

TURKEY TOLSON TJUPURRULA (1942 - 2001) Men’s Initiation Ceremony, 1982 30.5 x 61 cm | frame 43 x 74 cm synthetic polymer paint on canvas board PROVENANCE Field Collected, NT Private Collection, NT The Anne and Adrian Newstead Collection, NSW EXHIBITED Black Art White Walls – The Anne and Adrian Newstead Collection Grace Cossington Smith Gallery January – March 2014 Wagga Wagga Art Gallery April-June 2014 Moree Plains Gallery January -May 2015 Burrinja Gallery, Upwey,Victoria July-Sept 2015 Counihan Gallery, Moreland,Victoria, October – November 2015 Caloundra Regional Gallery Jan – February 2016 O Tempo Dos Sonhos – The Time of Dreaming CAIXAS Cultural in Brazil, São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Brasília, Recife and Fortaleza CASA FIAT DE CULTURA, Belo Horizonte, Brazil Museum of Art of Santa Catarina (MASC), Brazil Museum Cabanas, Guadalajara, Mexico Museo Nacional de las Culturas del Mundo, Mexico City, Mexico LITERATURE O Tempo Dos Sonhos – The Time of Dreaming, CAIXAS Cultural in Brazil EST $2,500 - 4,500

Turkey Tolson was born about eight kilometres east of Haasts Bluff in the early 1940s. After years working in the Haasts Bluff stock camp droving cattle to Mount Leibig, he underwent initiation into manhood. The family then moved to the Papunya settlement, where Turkey worked as a construction labourer and in the communal kitchen. In 1961 he married and moved with his young family to an outstation west of Papunya. After his first wife’s untimely death, he remarried at Papunya, where he lived during the early years of the painting movement. He joined Papunya Tula artists as one of its youngest members and painted his earliest artworks for Geoff Bardon in 1972.

The symbols in this work depict a sacred men’s initiation ceremony.

The dance boards show sites with water dreaming images, including parallel lines representing clouds. Men seated in pairs face each other with stone knives, spears and woomera at their sides.

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LOT #22

BILLY JOONGOORRA THOMAS (c.1920 - 2012) Waarla, 2000 80 x 100 cm natural earth pigments on canvas PROVENANCE Red Rock Arts, WA Cat. No 09/00 Walker Lane Gallery, WA Cat. No KP1062 Private Collection, WA EST $6,000 - 8,000

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Billy Thomas began painting on canvas in 1995, after he approached Waringarri Arts in Kununurra to supply him with painting materials.

Prior to that, he did not belong to any community of artists. He knew his country intimately and never ceased his ceremonial immersion and involvement within it. Right up until his final years, he continued to spend long periods ‘out bush’ before returning to Billiluna or Kununurra to paint. He was revered as a senior lawman and healer, custodian of secret initiation rites and ceremonial songlines.

Invariably his works are about ceremony; the formations of people in ritual, the body painting designs, and the ground patterns associated with various ceremonies.

Waarla is a huge mudflat in the Great Sandy Desert that becomes a vast lake after rain. It is an historic meeting place where diverse desert rites are maintained and taught to young initiates.

LOT #23

NYURAPAYIA (MRS BENNETT) NAMPITJINPA (1935 - 2013)

The Travels of a Group of Women, 2003 122 x 90.5 cm synthetic polymer paint on Belgian linen PROVENANCE Papunya Tula Artists, NT Cat. No. NN0308068 Lauraine Diggens Fine Art, Vic Cat. No. 220046 EXHIBITED Australian Aboriginal Art: DFAT Olympic Exhibition, Sao Paolo and Rio de Janiero, Brazil, 2014 Beyond Time, Booker-Lowe Gallery, Houston USA, 2019

Nyurapayia Nampitjinpa was born in Pitjantjatjara country, near the site of today’s Docker River community. She saw no white men until she was in her teens and spent much of her childhood at Pangkupirri, a set of sheltered rockholes deep in the range-folds of the Gibson Desert. By the time she walked in from the bush to the ration depot at Haasts Bluff and encountered mission life, she had become a magic healer and was soon recognised as a person of great ritual authority. She moved to Kintore, the new western settlement of the Pintupi closer to her traditional lands, and then on to Tjukurla, across the West Australian border in the 1980s.

Nyurapayia, was a close associate of the key painters who shaped the women’s painting movement in the early to mid 1990s.

Her depiction’s of the sand-dune country and surrounding rocky outcrops bear a relationship to the designs used for body painting during the inma ceremonial dance. At the time of her death in February 2013, Nyurapayia had reached the pinnacle of desert law and sacred knowledge and was revered by women throughout the Western Desert.

EST $6,000 - 9,000

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LOT #24

EMILY KAME KNGWARREYE (1910 - 1996) Awelye, 1993 91 x 122 cm synthetic polymer paint on Belgian linen PROVENANCE Delmore Gallery, NT Cat. No. 93K026 Thomas Vroom Collection, The Netherlands Ebes Collection, Vic accompanied by a certificate of authenticity from Delmore Gallery EST $40,000 - 60,000

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LOT #25

YANNIMA TOMMY WATSON (c.1935 - 2017) Untitled, 2014 91 x 121 cm | frame 94 x 124.5 cm synthetic polymer paint on Belgian linen PROVENANCE Yanda Art, NT Cat. No. TW201389 Private Collection, Vic EST $25,000 - 35,000

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LOT #26

EMILY KAME KNGWARREYE (1910 - 1996) My Country - Final Series, 1996 127 x 82 cm | frame 134 x 88 cm synthetic polymer paint on Belgian linen PROVENANCE Dacou (Dreaming Art Centre of Utopia), SA Aboriginal Gallery of Dreaming, Vic Lauraine Diggins Fine Art, Vic Art Mob, Tas Cat. No AM12242/16 Private Collection, Tas Accompanied by a photo of the artist creating the work EXHIBITED Earth’s Creation, the Paintings of Emily Kame Kngwarreye, Lauraine Diggins Fine Art, Melbourne, September - November 1998 LITERATURE Earth’s Creation, the Paintings of Emily Kame Kngwarreye, Lauraine Diggins Fine Art, Essay by Dr Daniel Thomas AM, Victoria, 1998 Emily Kame Kngwarreye, The Person and Her Paintings, Edited by Dr Anne Runhardt, Dacou Publishing 2009, pp176-177 illustrated EST $400,000 - 600,000

“Having exhausted all possible use of multiple round or long marks, Kngawerreye eliminated them all together, expanding her brush marks into broad blocks of tone and colour until she reinvented herself.”

- Judith Ryan, Senior Curator of Australian Art, National Gallery of Victoria

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Emily Kame Kngwarreye painting My Country - Final Series in 1996 38

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THE FINAL SERIES

Over a period of eight years, during which she painted more than 4000 canvases ‘on country’, she celebrated her country, Alhalkere, and the ceremonies and body paint designs associated with her Yam Dreaming. Her works were endlessly inventive. Those who watched her career unfold month by month, year after year, could chart the constant progression in her stylistic approach, imagery, and colour palette throughout this entire period. Her finest paintings were entirely intuitive. She was renowned for walking away from a canvas without even surveying the finished product, such was her faith in its composition, content, and meaning.

In August 1996 she was 87 years of age and clearly in poor health. Realising the end was imminent, she wanted to paint one last time and asked her nephew Fred Torres to bring paint and canvas.

He flew from Adelaide and rushed to her side. With no other materials at hand, he gave her a one-inch gesso brush normally used to cover the canvas in its first black ground. In no time at all, she dipped the brush into a pot of paint and filled a section of the small canvass he’d placed before her. Over the next few days she completed twenty-three more extraordinary canvases in this style. The paintings were like nothing she had ever painted before.

Dr. Margo Neale, the curator of Emily’s retrospective at the Queensland Art Gallery and her touring show for the National Museum of Australia, which toured Japan in 2008, described these paintings like this:

All lines and dots vanished into broad, gestural strokes swept across the surface as slabs of high-keyed colour composed in sections. Some were painted thinly, in washes of strident hot pinks, cyan blue and magenta over a black background, and others were lushly painted, in which every movement of the brush was visible in creamy folds of paint.

Dr. Daniel Thomas AM, Emeritus Director, Art Gallery of South Australia, 1998 referred to them as: her most American-seeming abstractions.

Great slabs of pure colour, often in a single layer. Lush and hectic pink and orange or stately blue and orange or, to close the Queensland Art Gallery’s retrospective exhibition, a ghostly whiteness, a curatorial suggestion of the artist’s impending death. and suggested that: In these last paintings we are confronted not with visuality but materiality.

Judith Ryan, the senior curator at the National Gallery of Victoria, went so far as to suggest that in creating these works featuring broad blocks in high tone and colour, Emily had ‘reinvented herself’ while Christopher Hodges, who knew the artist and her work intimately called them ‘beguiling in their simplicity’ .

Emily Kngwarreye died on the 20th of September 1996, barely two weeks after these works were created.

In spite of her ill health, Emily reached the zenith of her power and confidence as an artist in her final series. The singularity of her vision and the masterful deftness of her brush stroke were absolute.

- Adrian Newstead

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THE FINAL SERIES

Emily Kngwarreye’s confidence as a painter was evident from the moment she started painting on canvas in 1989.

Her self-assuredness lay in the practiced application of bold, fluid marks on the greased black skin of her countrywomen during preparations for women’s ceremonies.

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LOT #27

MINNIE PWERLE (1910 - 2006) Awelye Atnwengerrp, 2000 233 x 122 cm synthetic polymer paint on Belgian linen PROVENANCE Aboriginal Gallery of Dreamings, Vic Cat. No. 12251 Hank Ebes Collection, Vic accompanied by a certificate booklet from Aboriginal Gallery of Dreamings EST $22,000 - 28,000

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The manner in which Minnie Pwerle created her works was the result of an urgency to reconnect to the past and keep the Dreaming a living reality. Painting after painting, she depicted the body designs applied to women’s breasts and limbs for the regular ceremonial revivification of her country.

These bold linear patterns of stripes and curves evoke the movement of the women as they dance during ceremony. After smearing their bodies with animal fat, they trace these designs onto their breasts, arms and thighs, singing as each woman takes her turn being ‘painted up’.Then, often by firelight, they dance in formation to ritual singing. The songs relate to the Dreamtime stories of ancestral travel, as well as plants, animals, and natural forces.

Awelye - Women’s Ceremony - demonstrates respect for the land. In performing these ceremonies, they ensure well-being and happiness within their community.

LOT #28

LORNA NAPARRULA FENCER (c.1925 - 2006) Bush Potato Dreaming, 1997 122 x 122 cm | frame 126 x 126 cm synthetic polymer paint on Belgian linen PROVENANCE Warnayaka Art, NT Cat. No. 499-31 Aboriginal Gallery of Dreamings, Vic Cat. No. 7956 Ebes Collection, Vic EST $8,000 - 10,000

Lorna Napurrula Fencer was a senior Warlpiri artist born at Yartulu Yartulu. She was custodian of the inherited lands of Yumurrpa in the Tanami Desert. She began painting in the mid 1980s and is now widely acknowledged as one of the great Warlpiri artists from Lajamanu. She was a custodian of the Dreamings associated with bush potato, caterpillar, bush onion, yam, bush tomato, bush plum, many different seeds, and, importantly, water.

This painting tells the Dreamtime story of two women of the Napurrula and Nakamarra skin groups who are searching the countryside for bush potatoes. Bush potatoes grow as roots underground, so the women must use the digging sticks to find them. The meandering lines represent the complex root system and branches of the bush potato plant.

The circle is the place where the women dig to retrieve the wild yams which are excellent bush tucker. Lorna was a senior custodian for this Dreaming, which took place at Duck Ponds in the Northern Territory, Australia. She has painted a large tract of country through which the Dreaming runs, some of which is under flood water.

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LOT #29

MINNIE PWERLE (1910 - 2006) Awelye Atnwengerrp, 2004 180 x 91.5 cm synthetic polymer paint on Belgian linen PROVENANCE Dacou Gallery, SA Cat. No. 05974 Cicada Trading, Qld accompanied by a certificate of authenticity from Dacou Gallery EST $7,000 - 10,000

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Minnie’s career shared much in common with that of her sister-inlaw, the great Emily Kame Kngwarreye. Both began painting in their late 70s and both created work for a period of seven years. Despite a short early period during which Emily painted tightly controlled painstaking fields of tiny dots obscuring detailed iconography beneath, both painted the majority of their works equally gesturally and produced a prodigious output. Both artists painted works that were immensely popular, most especially amongst women, and were able to support a number of close relatives with the income they generated.

The bold linear patterns of stripes and curves throughout this particular painting depict the women’s ceremonial body paint design.

The songs they sing during preparation for ceremony (Awelye) relate to Dreamtime stories of ancestral travel as well as plants, animals and natural forces. In performing these ceremonies women demonstrate their respect for the land and ensure abundance during the season ahead.

LOT #30

EMILY KAME KNGWARREYE (1910 - 1996) Wild Potato Dreaming, 1993 121 x 90.5 synthetic polymer paint on Belgian linen PROVENANCE Dacou Gallery, SA Cat. No. 01618 Fireworks Gallery Cat. No. FW1960 Cicada Trading, Qld

Emily Kngwarreye’s paintings of wildflowers reflect a stage in the growth cycle of the wild yam. Emily’s middle name Kame is taken from the yam Dreaming site at Alhalkere.

The nutritional value of the yam is hidden underground, in the swollen roots and their pod-like attachments which are difficult to locate as the plant’s unpredictable growth patterns make harvest complicated and specialised. Traditionally, much effort is expended across large areas in the harvest of this valuable food.

Emily’s yam story can be found in all her work, even though in some paintings the yam motif is not obvious, it lies below the surface of them all.

The Cat. No. SS119728 is recorded verso indicating this work was created during a Dacou ‘on country’ workshop. accompanied by a booklet including a certificate of authenticity from Dacou Gallery EST $25,000 - 35,000

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THE LAST NOMADS In 1984, a group of nine Pintupi nomads wandered into Kiwirrkura to join their relatives. The group comprised four brothers (Warlimpirrnga, Walala, Tamilk/ Thomas, and Piyiti/Pierti), three sisters (Yalti,Yikultji and Takariya) - all in their early to late teens – as well as their two mothers, who were in their late 30’s.The father - the husband of the two wives - had died.

The group had until then roamed between waterholes near Lake Mackay, close to the Western Australia-Northern Territory border, wearing hair-string belts and armed with wooden spears, spear throwers, and intricately carved boomerangs. Their diet was dominated by goanna and rabbit, as well as bush food native plants. They had never before encountered the world outside their desert homelands.

The group could hardly have contemplated or comprehended the amount of attention their arrival would attract. The Melbourne Herald headline rang out We Find Lost Tribe and international media, who immediately began referring to them as the “Pintupi Nine’ or the Lost Nomads” descended in hordes on Alice Springs.

While they became instant celebrities, the Central Land Council threatened to prosecute anyone in the area without permits, so angry were they with the release of the news.

THE LAST NOMADS

When Piyiti/Pierti returned to the desert in 1986, Warlimpirrnga, Walala, and Tamlik (now known as “Thomas”) were taken under the watchful guidance of Dr. George Tjapaltjarri, a ‘medicine man’ of high degree who could continue their instruction through the ‘law’.

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The following year, having observed Dr. George and other artists painting, Warlimpirrnga asked for art materials.

Daphne Williams, the coordinator of Papunya Tula Artists, impressed with Warlimpirrnga’s efforts, sent eleven of his subsequent paintings to Gallery Gabrielle Pizzi, Melbourne in 1988. These were all purchased and later donated to the National Gallery of Victoria.

In time, all three brothers began painting, garnering international recognition in the art world as the ‘Tjapaltjarri Brothers’.

From the outset, their paintings related COOEE ART MARKETPLACE

to the travels and sites created by the sacred Tingari ancestors. They, along with Dr. George Tjapaltjarri, the old medicine man who had put them through the ‘law’, painted for Roslyn Premont’s Gallery Gondwana in Alice Springs during the 1990s. Employing a classical geometric painting style as their starting point, they slowly developed traditional imagery into their own individual styles.

While paintings by Warlimpirrnga and Thomas resonated with an op-art-like intensity of resounding shapes and lines, Walala became renowned for strongly gestural, boldly graphic works, featuring rectangles and abutting lines set against a stark monochrome black background. All continued painting throughout the next three decades, with Warlimpirrnga in particular gaining the greatest national and international renown.

During the early 1990s, Daphne Williams approached the painting men regarding the distribution of art materials amongst the women. Williams organized painting projects for the women of Kintore and nearby Kiwirrkurra. Slowly, the women became a driving creative force, infusing new life into Western Desert painting. The female members of the group, Yukultji, Yalti and Takarria all began painting in their own right for Papunya Tula Artists.

By 1999 Dr. George painted less and less frequently as his eyesight began to fail.

Walala, preferring his independence, lived in Alice Springs and Katherine, where he painted for a number of independent dealers. Warlimpirrnga, however, tired of life too far from his family and homeland, returned to paint principally for Papunya Tula artists. In 2015, his first solo exhibition in the United States was held at Salon 94 on the Bowery in New York City. A long journey from the homelands he left as a teenager as one of the last nomadic people in the world.

RELATED ARTWORKS 32 33 36 31, 40, 43, 47

Walala Tjapaltjarri Dr George Tjapaltjarri Takariya Napaltjarri Warlimpirrnga Tjapaltjarri

LOT #31

WARLIMPIRRNGA TJAPALTJARRI (c.1958 - ) Tingari, 2006 120 x150 cm synthetic polymer paint on Belgian linen PROVENANCE Waterhole Art, NSW Cat. No. HS043 Private Collection, NSW accompanied by a certificate of authenticity from Waterhole Art EST $18,000 - 28,000

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LOT #32

WALALA TJAPALTJARRI (1970 - ) Tingari Cycle, 2009 122 x 152 cm synthetic polymer paint on Belgian linen PROVENANCE Art Equity, NSW Cat. No. WAL200900 Private Collection, NSW EST $6,000 - 9,000

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LOT #33

DR GEORGE TJAPALTJARRI (c.1940 - 2017) Tingari Cycle, 1998 119 x 70.5 cm synthetic polymer paint on Belgian linen PROVENANCE Gallery Gondwana, NT Cat. No. GT3027 Aboriginal Gallery of Dreamings,Vic Cat. No. 7360 Hank Ebes Collection,Vic accompanied by a certificate booklet from Aboriginal Gallery of Dreamings EST $2,000 - 3,000 Paintings by Dr George Tjapaltjarri are generally raw and bold, conveying his strong, continuous association with his traditional country and his role as a highly respected Pintupi/Luritja elder.

Dr George was born circa 1940, south-west of Jupiter Well in the Gibson Desert of Western Australia, close to the location of present-day Kiwirrkurra. He was formerly known as George Takata Ward Tjapaltjarri, or George Tjampu (Ward) Tjapaltjarri.

His traditional country included Karrinwara, west of Kintore, and Kilingya in Wenampa, located to the west of Jupiter Well.

The title ‘Dr’ referred to his highly respected work as a community health worker and position as a traditional medicine man of his people. Dr George was one of several Maparn or Ngangkari (traditional healers) who worked in association with the Kintore and Tjukurla Medical Clinics.

Together with his family, Dr George first came into contact with white society when he walked out of the desert in 1964. He is intimately associated with the Three Brothers who were amongst the ‘lost tribe’ of nine Pintupi nomads who walked out of the Western Desert in 1984, because there were no male elders to put them through the law. Shortly after they arrived into Kiwirrkurra, it was Dr. George who performed this important task.

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LOT #35

LOT #34

ANATJARI TJAMPITJINPA

(1927 - 1999)

YALTI NAPANGARTI (c.1970 - )

Tingari, 1994

Wirrulnga, 2003

91.5 x 122 cm synthetic polymer paint on Belgian linen

91.5 x 122 cm synthetic polymer paint on Belgian linen

PROVENANCE Aboriginal Galler y of Dreamings, Vic Cat. No. 4097 Hank Ebes Collection, Vic

PROVENANCE Papunya Tula Artists, NT Cat. No. YN0301162 Aboriginal Gallery of Dreamings, Vic Cat. No. 10880 Ebes Collection, Vic

accompanied by a cer tificate booklet from Aboriginal Galler y of Dreamings EST $7,000 - 9,000

accompanied by a certificate booklet from Aboriginal Gallery of Dreamings and a certificate of authenticity from Papunya Tula Artists EST $2,800 - 3,800

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LOT #36

LOT #37

TAKARIYA NAPALTJARRI (c.1960 - )

PATRICK OLOODOODI TJUNGURRAYI (c.1935 - 2017)

Marrapinti, 2002

Wirrilpinya, 2009

61 x 90 cm synthetic polymer paint on Belgian linen

92 x 107 cm synthetic polymer paint on Belgian linen

PROVENANCE Papunya Tula Artists, NT Cat No. TN0203286 Aboriginal Gallery of Dreamings, Vic Cat No. 10782 Ebes Collection, Vic

PROVENANCE Papunya Tula Artists, NT Cat. No. PT0909052 Cicada Trading, Qld

EST $1,500 - 2,500

accompanied by a certificate of authenticity from Papunya Tula Artists EST $4,500 - 6,500

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LOT #38

MORRIS GIBSON TJAPALTJARRI (1957 - 2017) Rockholes at Patantjanya, 2002 121.5 x 152 cm synthetic polymer paint on linen PROVENANCE Papunya Tula Artists, NT Cat. No. MG0203268 Private Collection, SA accompanied by a certificate of authenticity from Papunya Tula Artists EST $6,000 - 8,000

Morris Gibson is the eldest son of Yala Yala Gibbs Tjungurrayi and Ningura Napurrula, who are both important Papunya Tula artists. He departed Papunya for Kintore with his family in 1981 and created his first paintings for Papunya Tula Artists in 1994.

In this work, he depicts designs associated with the rockhole and spring water site pf Patantjanya, south-west of Lake McDonald. In mythological times, a group of Tingari men travelled underground from this site to Kulkuta. Two Kuniya (pythons) travelled with the men.

The Tingari Cycle is a secret song cycle sacred to initiated men. The Tingari are Dreamtime Beings who travelled across the landscape performing ceremonies to create and shape the country associated with Dreaming sites. The Tingari ancestors gathered at these sites for Maliera (initiation) ceremonies. The sites take the form of, and are located at, significant rockholes, sand hills, sacred mountains and water soakages in the Western Desert.

Tingari may be poetically interpreted as song-line paintings relating to the songs (of the people) and creation stories (of places) in Pintupi mythology.

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LOT #39

TIM LEURA TJAPALTJARRI (c.1936 - 1984) Love Story, 1979 170 x 95 cm synthetic polymer paint on cotton duck PROVENANCE Holmes a Court Collection, Heytesbury Holdings, WA Sotheby’s, Important Aboriginal Art, Melbourne, 24/06/2002, Lot No. 110 Private Collection, USA LITERATURE Cf. Paintings on the same theme by the artist’s brother Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri include man’s Love Story, 1978 in the collection of the Art Gallery of South Australia (see Johnson V, The Art of Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri, G +B International, 1994 Pl.21 p75) and Ngarlu Love Story, 1991 (Johnson, 1994 pl.55 p128) EST $25,000 - 35,000

Tim Leura was steeped in ancient lore and, despite his initial reservations, he became one of the four founding members of the Western Desert art movement in 1970. He was Geoffrey Bardon’s invaluable friend, assistant, and interpreter. A man of whom Bardon wrote ‘he is my dearest and closest friend in the Western Desert’. While today Clifford Possum is the better known of the two ‘brothers’, Tim Leura is recognised as having been Possum’s spiritual mentor and instrumental in the development of Possum’s talent and technique. In the mid 70’s they collaborated on a series of monumental paintings incorporating several Dreaming stories in a map-like configuration. These works are regarded as being among the most significant in Aboriginal art.

This painting depicts an aspect of the Love Story narrative that became his brother, Clifford Possum’s, leitmotif. It is a tale of incestuous lust and the magical spells cast by an old Tjungurrayi man in order to seduce a woman of the wrong skin. To achieve his illicit end he uses sacred songs and a hairstring spindle made from his own hair and a pair of thin sticks. Overcome by lust he drops the hair string that he is braiding and it scatters like love on the wind. A whirlwind blows in an attempt to destroy his love magic but to no avail. He takes the woman for his own. It is an indiscretion for which he will eventually be punished.

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LOT #40

LOT #41

WARLIMPIRRNGA TJAPALTJARRI (c.1958 - )

DONKEYMAN LEE TJUPURRULA (c.1921 - 1994)

Fire Dreaming, 1996

Untitled, 1987

91 x 122 cm synthetic polymer paint on Belgian linen

90 x 118 cm synthetic polymer paint on canvas

PROVENANCE Papunya Tula Artists, NT Cat. No. WT9603101 Aboriginal Gallery of Dreamings, Vic Cat. No. 5841 Ebes Collection, Vic accompanied by a certificate booklet from Aboriginal Gallery of Dreamings and a certificate of authenticity from Papunya Tula Artists

PROVENANCE Catholic Mission, Balgo Hills, WA Cat. No. 876545 The Edward’s Collection, Qld Sotheby’s Australia, Important Aboriginal Art, Melbourne, June 1997, Lot No. 206 Aboriginal Gallery of Dreamings, Vic Cat. No. 12182 Hank Ebes Collection, Vic

EST $7,000 - 9,000

EST $4,500 - 6,500

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LOT #42

LOT #43

YALA YALA GIBBS TJUNGURRAYI (c.1928 - 1998)

WARLIMPIRRNGA TJAPALTJARRI (c.1958 - )

Tingari at Karrkurruntjintjana, 1984

Tingari, 1993

122 x 122 cm synthetic polymer paint on Belgian linen

61 x 122 cm synthetic polymer paint on Belgian linen

PROVENANCE Papunya Tula Artists, NT Cat. No YY840814 Private Collection, NSW

PROVENANCE Papunya Tula Artists NT, Cat. No. WT931160 Aboriginal Gallery of Dreamings, Vic Cat. No. 5221 Ebes Collection, Vic

accompanied by a certificate of authenticity from Papunya Tula Artists EST $5,000 - 7,000

accompanied by a certificate booklet from Aboriginal Gallery of Dreamings and a certificate of authenticity from Papunya Tula Artists EST $3,500 - 5,500

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LOT #44

YALTI NAPANGARTI (c.1970 - ) Marrapinti, 2003 91 x 122 cm synthetic polymer paint on Belgian linen PROVENANCE Papunya Tula Artists, NT Cat. No. YN0305088 Aboriginal Gallery of Dreamings, Vic Cat. No. 10879 Ebes Collection, Vic accompanied by a certificate booklet from Aboriginal Gallery of Dreamings and a certificate of authenticity from Papunya Tula Artists EST $2,800 - 3,800

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LOT #45

LONG TOM TJAPANANGKA (1930 - 2006) Anyali Range, 2000 183 x 122 cm synthetic polymer paint on Belgian linen PROVENANCE Field Collected by Paul Walsh, NT Cat. No. LT 99008 Aboriginal Gallery of Dreamings, Vic Cat. No. 8177 Hank Ebes Collection, Vic accompanied by a certificate booklet from Aboriginal Gallery of Dreamings EST $6,000 - 8,000

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LOT #46

JOHNNY YUNGUT TJUPURRULA (c.1930 - 2016) Two Rockholes, 1999 91 x 61 cm synthetic polymer paint on Belgian linen PROVENANCE Papunya Tula Artists, NT Cat. No. JY9909294 Aboriginal Gallery of Dreamings, Vic Cat. No. 8109 Hank Ebes Collection, Vic accompanied by an original Papunya Tula certificate and a certificate booklet from Aboriginal Gallery of Dreamings EST $1,800 - 2,500

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LOT #47

WARLIMPIRRNGA TJAPALTJARRI (c.1958 - ) Wanampi Dreaming at Wikinkarra, 1996 91 x 61 cm synthetic polymer paint on Belgian linen PROVENANCE Papunya Tula Artists, NT Cat. No. WT960809 Aboriginal Gallery of Dreamings, Vic Cat. No. 5845 Ebes Collection, Vic accompanied by a certificate booklet from Aboriginal Gallery of Dreamings and a certificate of authenticity from Papunya Tula Artists EST $3,000 - 4,000

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LOT #48

NINGURA NAPURRULA (c.1938 - 2013) Women’s Business, 2006 177 x 120 cm natural earth pigments on canvas PROVENANCE Muk Muk Aboriginal Art, NT Art Index, NSW Private Collection, NSW EST $9,000 - 12,000

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Ningura Naparrula was born south of Kiwirrkurra. In her early 20s, she travelled with her husband Yala Yala Gibbs to Papunya. After Yala Yala Gibbs became a founding member of the Papunya Tula artists group, she assisted him on his precise and detailed Tingari Paintings.

She began painting in her own right in the second year of the Haasts Bluff/Kintore women’s painting camp. Her dynamic compositions are characterised by strong linear designs, which are slowly built up through intricate patterning and appear boldly defined upon a background of dense, monochromatic in-filling. Her focus centres upon her female ancestors who travelled the vast country, creating sacred sites and establishing customs and ceremonies.

This painting depicts designs associated with the rockhole site of Marrapinti, to the west of the Kiwirrkurra Community. A large group of senior women camped at this rockhole making the nosebones, also known as Marrapinti, which are worn through a hole in the nose-web. These nose-bones were originally worn by both men and women but are now only worn by the older generation on ceremonial occasions. The women later travelled east, passing through the Kiwirrkurra area.

LOT #49

DOROTHY NAPANGARDI (c.1956 - 2013) Mina Mina, 2006 167 x 181 cm synthetic polymer paint on Belgian linen PROVENANCE Ngintaka Arts, NT Private Collection, NSW accompanied by images of the artist creating the artwork EXHIBITED Black & White, Lauraine Diggins Fine Art Melbourne, May 2009 Black & White, NG Art Gallery Sydney, December 2008 EST $18,000 - 22,000

Dorothy Napangardi began creating works tracing the grid-like patterns of the salt encrustations on the Mina Mina clay pans in 1997, marking a significant artistic shift in her work. Over the following three-year period, her paintings became less and less contrived and increasingly spare, all detail pared back to the barest essentials.

These new works compelled the spectators eye to dance across the painted surface, just as the Karntakulangu ancestral women danced in their hundreds across the country during the region’s creation.

As these works developed, Dorothy’s extraordinary spatial ability enabled her to create mimetic grids and lines of white dots (on a black ground) or black dots (on a white ground, such as in this lovely work), tracing the travels of her female ancestors as they danced their way, in joyous exultation, through the saltpans, Spinifex, and sand hills, clutching their digging sticks in outstretched hands.

Kathleen Petyarre has been quoted as saying ‘those Walpiri ladies, they’re mad about dancing, they go round and round and round dancing, they’re always dancing’. Little wonder that the surfaces of Dorothy’s canvases become dense rhythms of lines and grids, as she mapped the paths of these dancing women at various locations throughout Mina Mina.

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MINNIE PWERLE & EMILY KNGWARREYE

MINNIE PWERLE AND EMILY KNGWARREYE

Minnie Pwerle began painting depictions of her country, Atnwengerrp, and its Dreamings when in her late 70s. There are many parallels between the careers of Minnie Pwerle and her countrywoman, the great Emily Kame Kngwarreye. Both began painting late in life and both created work for a period of seven years.

Both painted the majority of their works gesturally and produced a prodigious output. Both artists painted works that were immediately popular and were able to support a number of close relatives with the income they generated.

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Indeed, the comparison between the two women, who were sisters-in-law, extended to their fundamental feelings of reverence, abandon, and intuition.

The manner in which they created their works appeared to be the result of an urgency to reconnect to the past and to keep the Dreaming a living reality.

Just like Emily Kngwarreye before her, in painting after painting Minnie boldly and self-assuredly depicted the body designs painted onto women’s breasts and limbs for the regular ceremonial revivification of her country.

While the rambling tuberous roots of the Yam or Bush Potato were Emily’s Dreamings and the subject of her art, Minnie’s primary focus was the Bush Melon and its seeds. Her AwelyeAntnwengerrp paintings drew directly from these ceremonial practices, depicting bush melon, seed, and breast designs in powerful multi-coloured brushstrokes that built into a structured patchwork of luminous colour most often emanating from within a darker under-layer. The energy of these vibrant colourful works seemed to capture the joy of coming across these sweet bush foods, now scarce and difficult to find.

Minnie passed away in 2006, her life an extraordinary journey mapping the

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transition from that of a nomad through the early years of the pastoral industry, to a new era of Aboriginal control and a flourishing art movement at Utopia.

It has only been possible to assess the true quality of her output in retrospect, because her career as a painter was rapid and chaotic and her output uneven and often repetitive. Since her death it has become apparent that her finest works are enduring masterpieces. Despite her many minor works, these place her amongst the most important Aboriginal artists that painted during the early years of the twenty-first century.

RELATED ARTWORKS Minnie Pwerle 7, 27, 29, 50, 55, 87 Emily Kame Kngwarreye 8, 24, 26, 30, 51, 53, 84, 85, 86, 97

LOT #50

MINNIE PWERLE (1910 - 2006) Awelye, 1999 122 x 91.5 cm synthetic polymer paint on Belgian linen PROVENANCE Aboriginal Gallery of Dreamings, Vic Cat. No. 12292 Hank Ebes Collection, Vic accompanied by a certificate booklet from Aboriginal Gallery of Dreamings EST $9,000 - 12,000

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LOT #51

EMILY KAME KNGWARREYE (1910 - 1996) Emily’s Country, 1994 212 x 148 cm | frame 215 x 151 cm synthetic polymer paint on Belgian linen PROVENANCE Aboriginal Gallery of Dreamings, Vic Cat. No. 12398 Ebes Collection, Vic accompanied by a certificate booklet from Aboriginal Gallery of Dreamings EST $260,000 - 320,000

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In this major work, created with a thick-textured fusion of purple, yellow, pink and blue tones, Emily Kngwarreye provides a panorama of the desert’s food sources after rain with laser-like intensity.

Often hidden from view, these seed, fruit, and root vegetables are enormously bountiful. The requirement to understand the life cycles of all bush foods is necessary for survival.

The dramatic transformation of the desert, from bare to abundant, is a display of its power. Linked into this is women’s ceremonial life (awelye), based on the belief that these ceremonies help nurture the desert food sources and assure future fertile generations.

Emily Kame Kngwarreye is widely regarded as Australia’s most important and successful Aboriginal artist. Her remarkable career lasted just 7 years until her passing at 86 in 1996.The painterly quality and originality of her works extended her influence far beyond the reach of Aboriginal art, attracting an international audience ready to acclaim her new and innovative style.

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LOT #52

BARBARA WEIR (1945 - ) My Mother’s Country, c.1998 180 x 117 cm synthetic polymer paint on Belgian linen PROVENANCE Aboriginal Gallery of Dreamings, Vic Cat. No 12817 Hank Ebes Collection, Vic EST $12,000 - 15,000

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Barbara Weir was born at Bundy River Station, Utopia. Her country is Atnwengerrrp and her language is Anmatyerre and Alyawarr. At the age of nine, Barbara became one of the Stolen Generation, taken by the Native Welfare department. She was fostered out to various families in Alice Springs, Victoria, and Darwin. During these years she lost her family but vowed to return and re-claim her heritage. In the late 1960s she returned to Utopia with her children, relearnt the languages and her culture, and re-established contact with all her family including her mother Minnie Pwerle and her aunt, the late Emily Kame Kngwarreye.

The region depicted is called Atnwengerrp, the homeland of the artist’s grandfather. The background depicts campsites and traces the route taken by her people as they trekked across country. The intricate dot work highlights the features of the land in which her mother once lived.

LOT #53

EMILY KAME KNGWARREYE (1910 - 1996) Alalgura Country, 1993 151 x 91 cm | frame 157 x 97.5 cm synthetic polymer paint on Belgian linen PROVENANCE Delmore Gallery, NT Cat. No. 93L043 Private Collection, Qld Ebes Collection, Vic EST $45,000 - 65,000

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THE FOUR PWERLE SISTERS Four sisters, all from Atnwengerrp in the Eastern Desert, approximately 280 kms north-east of Alice Springs. All painting in their own distinct style, but all sharing the same Dreaming. All inspired by desert landscape and spiritual ancestors who walked across the empty lands at the dawn of creation.

The first to paint on canvas was the eldest.

Minnie, sister-in-law to the renowned Emily Kame Kngwarreye. Minnie’s sisters Emily, Molly and Galya followed several years later at the Urultja outstation on the Utopia clan lands, under the watchful eyes of relatives Fred Torres and his mother Barbara Weir in late 2004.

THE FOUR PWERLE SISTERS

Although most artists from Urultja employ dotting techniques, these four women painted a different way. No dots or concentric circles, u-shapes or digging sticks - just vibrant colours, and thick, fluid lines that create a depth of field and impart an emotional intensity that defies explanation.

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Minnie’s broad, luminescent flowing lines and circles; Molly’s free and simple brush strokes; Emily’s smaller, crossover shapes creating a busier effect; Galya’s small kidney shapes representing food in abundance - each stroke of the brush depicting a ceremonial body mark used in dance. Together they evoke the shimmer of writhing painted bodies, dancing in ceremonial formation, illuminated by firelight.

Aboriginal women’s art is less conventional than that of men. They paint simple but important things, often food - bush tucker, fruit, seeds whereas men paint the sacred and the ceremonial, which they don’t like to talk about. According to Weir, women also have a greater capacity to sit for long periods singing up the country to ensure wellbeing and bring forth abundant seasons year after year. They appear almost mesmerised as they make their marks. They talk to each other in COOEE ART MARKETPLACE

their language about the story they are painting and about the old days and their family, sometimes laughing and singing, sometimes in silence.

The painting complete, these artists put down their brushes, sprawl on blankets, and share common family and clan stories with their children, their extended family, and with others, who join them sitting upon the red earth, ‘on country’.

RELATED ARTWORKS 7, 27, 29, 50, 55, 87 54 56 57 58 96

Minnie Pwerle The Four Sisters Molly Pwerle Emily Pwerle Galya Pwerle Emily Pwerle

LOT #54

THE FOUR SISTERS - MINNIE, MOLLY, EMILY & GALYA PWERLE Women’s Ceremonies, 2005 122 x 91.5 cm | frame 128 x 98 cm synthetic polymer paint on Belgian linen PROVENANCE Dacou Gallery, SA Cat. No. 0513 Aboriginal Gallery of Dreamings, Vic Cat. No. 12814 Hank Ebes Collection, Vic accompanied by a certificate booklet from Aboriginal Gallery of Dreamings EST $9,000 - 12,000

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LOT #55

LOT #56

MINNIE PWERLE (1910 - 2006)

MOLLY PWERLE (c.1919)

Awelye Atnwengerrp, 1996

Aldappa Dance Lines, 2005

91 x 122 cm synthetic polymer paint on Belgian linen

90 x 122 cm synthetic polymer paint on Belgian linen

PROVENANCE Aboriginal Gallery of Dreamings, Vic Cat. No. 10344 Ebes Collection, Vic

PROVENANCE Aboriginal Gallery of Dreamings, Vic Cat. No. 11449 Ebes Collection, Vic

accompanied by a certificate booklet from Aboriginal Gallery of Dreamings and a photo of the artist with the artwork

accompanied by a certificate booklet from Aboriginal Gallery of Dreamings and a photo of the artist with the artwork

EST $7,000 - 9,000

EST $4,500 - 6,500

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LOT #57

LOT #58

EMILY PWERLE (c.1922)

GALYA PWERLE (c.1930)

Body Paint Design & Desert Grasses, 2005

Awelye Atnwengerrp, Women’s Sacred Sites, 2005

91 x 122 cm synthetic polymer paint on canvas

91 x 123 cm synthetic polymer paint on Belgian linen

PROVENANCE Aboriginal Gallery of Dreamings, Vic Cat. No. 11516 Ebes Collection, Vic

PROVENANCE Dacou Gallery, SA Cat. No. 06226 Aboriginal Gallery of Dreamings, Vic Cat. No. 11200 Ebes Collection, Vic

accompanied by a certificate booklet from Aboriginal Gallery of Dreamings and a photo of the artist with the artwork EST $5,000 - 7,000

accompanied by a certificate booklet from Aboriginal Gallery of Dreamings EST $4,500 - 6,500 AUSTRALIAN INDIGENOUS FINE ART AUCTION

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LOT #59

ABIE KEMARRE LOY (1972 - ) Sand Hill Country, 2013 107 x 152 cm synthetic polymer paint on Belgian linen PROVENANCE Gallerie Australis, SA Cat. No. GAAL02131651 Private Collection, NSW accompanied by a certificate of authenticity from Gallerie Australis EXHIBITED Art Paris Art Fair, Grand Palais, Paris, 2013 Exposition Arts D’Australie - a la Barclays Banque Privee, Avenue, George V, Paris, 10th December - 17th February 2014 EST $4,000 - 6,000

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Abie Loy was born on Utopia station, about 270 km north-east of Alice Springs in the Northern Territory. Her mother, Margaret Loy Pula, won the Wynne Prize for landscape painting at the Art Gallery of NSW in 2012. Her aunt is the celebrated artist Gloria Petyarre and her Grandmother, Kathleen Petyarre, won the National Aboriginal Art Award in 2002.

An innovative mid-career artist, Abie was mentored by her grandmother Kathleen Petyarre from the time she began painting at 19. Over the years, Abie further developed her skills as an artist to become an extraordinarily talented designer, experimenting with line, colour and form.

In this painting, Abie depicts the part of the songline that leads to the ceremonial women’s site associated with the green pea (antweth) plant life found in her ancestral sandhill country.

This work is representational of the Bush Hen, travelling through the country looking for bush seeds that are scattered over the land, as well bush tomatoes that bear a yellow fruit called Arkitjira. Bush plums are also found in this area. The Bush Hen Dreaming songline ends at Mosquito Bore.

LOT #60

KATHLEEN PETYARRE (1940 - 2018) Mountain Devil Lizard Dreaming - Sandhill Country (After Hailstorm), 2004 122 x 122 cm synthetic polymer paint on Belgian linen PROVENANCE Gallerie Australis, SA Cat. No. GAKP1104449 Cicada Trading, Qld Signed Verso and accompanied by a certificate of authenticity from Gallerie Australis EST $6,000 - 8,000 Katheen Petyarre is best known for her finely wrought, intimate renditions of the vast landscapes in the Eastern Desert. These were created during the epic journeys of her Dreaming ancestor and totem, the tiny Thorny Devil Lizard, referred to as ‘that Old Woman Mountain Devil’.

This tiny desert creature is believed to have created the vast desert home of the Eastern Anmatyerre people by moving the sand, grain by grain, since the dawn of time. This painting presents an aerial view of the site where men and women of the Eastern Anmatyerre language conduct important secret and sacred initiation ceremonies. This Dreaming site is situated in the artist’s father’s country and the general locality is identified by a group of sandhills. The painting portrays the area scattered with seeds, summer bush flowers and Spinifex grasses.

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LOT #61

EUBENA NAMPITJIN (1924 - 2013) Pankapirni, 2003 60 x 119 cm synthetic polymer paint on Belgian linen PROVENANCE Warlayirti Artists, Balgo Hills, WA Cat. No. 1213/03 Cooee Art Gallery, NSW Cat. No. 1530 The Anne and Adrian Newstead Private Collection, NSW accompanied by a certificate of authenticity from Warlayirti Artists EST $6,000 - 9,000

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While Balgo’s physical isolation has conferred the space to evolve a distinct and unique artistic style, Eubena’s own separation from her homeland manifested as an art of absence, an act of homage which crystallised the poignancy of her country. The sense of raw energy and spontaneity in her work, with her trademark use of vibrant colour, bold patterning, and rough and ready handling, creates an ‘extraordinary sense of presence,’ that overrides any connotations of the work as an object of anthropological significance and invites the viewer ‘to appreciate pictures for their immediate visual impact as works of contemporary art’ * John McDonald, Sydney Morning Herald, 25 Feb, 1995 In this work Eubena painted her country along the middle stretches of the Canning Stock Route, near Kunawarritji (Well 33) and a pamarr (hill) named Yilpa. This is place where Eubena would often hunt and gather food. The strong lines in the painting depict the tali (sandhills) that dominate this country.

LOT #62

WALANGKURA NAPANANGKA (1946 - 2014) Wirrulnga (Two Rockholes), 1999 122 x 92 cm synthetic polymer paint on Belgian linen PROVENANCE Papunya Tula Artists, NT Cat. No. WN9911149 Private Collection, Vic Aboriginal Gallery of Dreamings, Vic Cat No. 8167 Ebes Collection, Vic accompanied by a certificate booklet from Aboriginal Gallery of Dreamings and a certificate of authenticity from Papunya Tula Artists EST $7,000 - 9,000

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LOT #63

JACK BRITTEN (c.1921 - 2001) The Kawariny (Bungle Bungles), 2000 120 x 90 cm natural earth pigments on Belgian Linen PROVENANCE Narrangunny Art Traders, WA Cat. No. N1328JB Kimberley Art, Vic Private Collection, Vic EST $4,000 - 6,000

Jack Britten was born and spent his childhood at Tickelara Station in the north-west of Australia, at a time when many Gija people were massacred during the gold rush at Hall’s Creek and Chinaman’s Garden in the East Kimberley region.

‘Sometimes they bin all day shootin people there,’ Jack recalled in his later years, ‘my father and mother and grandparents were with good gadiya (white man). I might have got shot if he didn’t look after me’ (cited in Ryan 1993: 41).

Jack Britten began painting earlier than almost all of his contemporaries, including Rover Thomas and Paddy Jaminji. His grandparents taught him to paint using traditional materials, methods and themes. Despite a vast repertoir, Jack Britten is most renowned for his depictions of the Purnululu, the Bungle Bungle region of which he became the most senior living custodian.

Throughout his career he constantly drew inspiration from this land, painting the Bungle Bungles as clusters of dome shaped mountains, layered with glistening white or black trails of dots. Excentricities and undulations in composition and stylistic manner were to be found throughout his artistic output.

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LOT #64

QUEENIE MCKENZIE NAKARA (1930 - 1998) The Three Wise Men Visit Jesus Near Warmun, 1994-5 152.5 x 101 cm natural earth pigments on Belgian linen PROVENANCE Field Collected, Pensioner Unit Warmun Community, WA Neil McLeod Fine Art, Vic Private Collection, Vic Signed by artist verso with aspects of the story annotated “3 wise men on camels visiting the god man Jesus in the bed from grass.

“Mr Jobst from Broome the Godfather man praying for the baby.

“All this mob looking at the camel men coming with presents.”

EST $25,000 - 35,000

Queenie McKenzie was born c.1930 at the Old Texas station on the Ord River in the north west of Western Australia. As a young girl she began her life of cooking for the stockmen, tending and riding horses, and journeying as they drove cattle across the vast pastoral region of the north.

During the 1970s, Queenie, then in her fifties, played a leading role in community affairs and experimented with representational art as an educational tool in the local school. She taught Gija language and cultural traditions as part of the ‘two-way’ education given at the school. Besides helping to maintain ancient knowledge of sacred sites and the Dreaming mythology, it seamlessly paralleled bible stories and provided the young with both a spiritual awareness and an involvement in community activities. She participated in both traditional ceremonies and the Pentecostal gatherings that were held near Frog Hollow about a half hour from Warmun.

Queenie McKenzie earned world wide acclaim with distinct and influential artworks depicting the country of her childhood and early working life around Texas Station, as well as other sites throughout the East Kimberley region. She died in 1998, the year the Warmun art centre was formerly established.

In 1995, the year this work was painted, she worked at the pensioner unit where she lived with Rover Thomas and his wife Rita. Here she painted the majority of her major works for entrepreneurs who visited the community from time to time.

In an interview towards the end of her life she reminded us that the only word she had ever learnt to read and write was her own name, as it was required to sign her paintings. Yet she was, in her lifetime and still to this day, recognised as a spiritual and cultural icon, whose commitment to art has left an indelible impact on Australian history and culture.

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ROVER THOMAS Rover Thomas was born in WalmatjarriKukaja country near Well 33 on the Canning Stock Route. He lived a traditional bush life until he was taken to Billiluna Station at 11 years of age, where he was initiated after his mother’s death. He subsequently spent a lifetime travelling the stock routes of Australia’s far-north. After working for a period as a jackeroo on the Canning Stock Route, he became a fencing contractor in Wyndham and later worked as a stockman in the Northern Territory and the fringes of the Gibson and Great Sandy Deserts, including Bow River Station and later Texas Downs, Old Lissadell and Mabel Downs. ‘I been all over, me,’ he said, when describing his intimate knowledge and involvement with the vast expanses of sparse desert and Kimberley terrain.

ROVER THOMAS

After political decisions caused large numbers of Aboriginal stockmen to be displaced from pastoral leases, rather than returning to his own country deep in the desert, Rover finally settled at Warmun in 1975. Cyclone Tracy had cataclysmically laid waste to Darwin the previous Christmas and many Indigenous people saw it as a sign that their culture and traditions needed strengthening. A powerful dream involving the spirit of Rover’s dead aunt inspired him to create a song and dance cycle that evolved into the Krill Krill ceremony. The spirit, in the company of other spirit beings, described the details of a journey that she had undertaken after her death. In Rover’s re-visitation of that dream, he, too, saw the places and the characters involved in the saga. At the end of the song cycle, the travelling spirit looks from Wyndham across the waters to the northeast and witnesses the Rainbow Serpent’s vengeful destruction of the Territory capital.

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The ceremonial re-enactment of this dream first took place in 1977 and was repeated at a number of locations in the East Kimberley region, in Arnhem Land, and further afield through the late 1970s and early 1980s. During the ceremony, |

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painted boards depicting the important sites and spirit beings were carried on the shoulders of the participants. The boards used in the early ceremonies were created by Rover’s uncle and mentor, Paddy Jaminji, who was assisted

by Jacko Dolmyn, Paddy Mosquito, Rover, and others.

Although Rover occasionally included figurative elements and topographical profiles in his paintings, Rover’s work is more familiarly characterized by an aerial perspective in common with Central and Western desert art. Had he not spent a lifetime of travel and finally settled in Gija tribal country at Turkey Creek, hundreds of kilometers to the north of his birthplace and the country of his Dreaming, his art would have had much closer aesthetic ties to the Pintupi painters of Kintore and Kiwirrkurra in the use of representational symbols, such as circles, u-shapes, and dotting.

His earliest works, created during the period between 1981 and 1984, are planar, map-like paintings referring to sites and pathways of ancestral or historical significance and his own travels in the region. They draw the viewer into spacious planes of painterly applied and textured ochre. The white dots serve only to create emphasis and draw the eye along pathways of time and movement, following the forms of the land in which important events are encoded.

Warm and earthy ochres, along with the palpable sense of spirituality, invite the viewer to consider the unfolding of important events, while at the same time placing the viewer within an ancient and timeless landscape.

Rover Thomas was a cultural leader and the seminal figure in establishing the East Kimberley School. He is, according to almost every empirical measure, the most influential Aboriginal artist in the history of the Kimberley art movement.

LOT #65

ROVER JOOLAMA THOMAS (1926 - 1998) Canning Stock Route, 1984 121 x 60 cm | frame 134 x 74 cm natural earth pigments on composition board PROVENANCE Field Collected in Turkey Creek, c.1986 Kimberley Art, Vic Cat. No. K13 Aboriginal Gallery of Dreamings, Vic Ebes Collection, Vic EXHIBITED Nangara: The Australian Aboriginal Art Exhibition from the Ebes Collection, Stichting Sint-jan, Brugge, Belgium, 1996 The Australian Aboriginal Art Exhibition, Hokkaido Asahikawa Museum of Art, Asahikawa, Japan; Tochigi Prefectual Museum of Fine Arts, Utsunomiya, Japan; Iwaki City Art Museum, Iwaki, Japan, 2001; Shimonoseki Prefectural Art Museum, Japan, 2001 Dreamtime - Aboriginal Art from the Ebes Collection, Arken Museum of Modern Art, Ishoj, Copenhagen, Denmark, 2006. (10th Anniversary Exhibition) LITERATURE Hank Ebes (ed.), Nangara: The Australian Aboriginal Art Exhibition from the Ebes Collection, Melbourne: The Aboriginal Gallery of Dreamings, 1996, Cat. No.105 and 112 Hank Ebes (ed.), The Australian Aboriginal Art Exhibition, Japan: The Yomiuri Shimbun, 2001, Cat. No 43 and 45 page 51.

Cf. For a similar painting of the same subject see Deutscher & Hackett, Important Australian & International Fine Art, Melbourne, 15/07/2020, Lot No. 76 EST $70,000 - 90,000

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LOT #66

CLIFFORD POSSUM TJAPALTJARRI (1932 - 2002) Corkwood Dreaming, 1996 141 x 88 cm | frame 144 x 91.5 cm synthetic polymer paint on Belgian linen PROVENANCE Aboriginal Gallery of Dreamings, Vic Cat. No 5717 Hank Ebes Collection, Vic accompanied by a certificate booklet from Aboriginal Gallery of Dreamings and images of the artist with the artwork Signed verso EST $18,000 - 22,000

Clifford Possum began his artistic career in the 1950s at Glen Helen, when he found that he earned more pay and lived under better conditions while producing carvings for the developing tourist market than he had as a stockman. His carvings were renowned in Central Australia for their brilliant craftsmanship and realistic detail.

He did not join the growing band of active painters working at Papunya until 1972.

His early paintings conveyed a remarkable sense of atmosphere.

These stood out from those of other Western and Central Desert artists, who were less preoccupied with evoking a psychological mood in their paintings. As he developed his art practice, Clifford introduced Western iconography and figurative imagery to convey certain elements in his narratives. This played a dual role in both making them more intelligible to Western audiences allowing him to create imaginative compositions within the parameters of the ‘law’.

In his work Clifford has painted an aspect of the Corkwood Dreaming songline that passes through Anmatjerre land near Napperby in the Tanami Desert region.

Corkwood trees are covered in a thick bark which allows them to survive severe fire and regenerate new sprouts from the trunk. It produces nectar when it is in flower and you will see many birds, particularly honey eaters, who favour the sweet and sticky substance.

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LOT #67

QUEENIE MCKENZIE NAKARA (1930 - 1998) Mook Mook Owls with Young, 1996 90 x 90 cm natural earth pigments on Belgian linen PROVENANCE Painted at Pensioner Unit Warmun Community, WA Neil McLeod Fine Art,Vic Private Collection,Vic signed verso EST $6,000 - 8,000 The Mook Mook Owls, mother and baby, are found in a cave at the Blue Tongue Lizard Dreaming site, adjacent to Pompei Pillar near the turnoff to the Argyle Diamond Mine. The cave site is called Tunnel Creek. Owls are associated with birth and death amongst Gija people.

In the Narrangunny (Dreaming story), an Aboriginal woman was sitting at a waterhole fishing for bream. After catching a few fish, she heard a fearsome noise coming from above. Thinking it was the ‘devil-devil’, she threw everything in the air and ran to her camp screaming. A few of the bravest men were dispatched to investigate the frightening sound, only to find, while checking a small cave above the fishing hole, owls, ‘damboyn’ sitting in the darkness making their ‘mook-mook’ call – the sound was merely being amplified by the cave walls.

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LOT #68

HECTOR JANDANAY (c.1927 - 2006) Untitled, 1987 120 x 120 cm natural earth pigments on board PROVENANCE Kimberley Art,Vic Cat No. 00558 Sotheby’s Australia, Aboriginal Art, Sydney, Nov 2010, Lot No. 164 Private Collection,Vic accompanied by a certificate of authenticity from Kimberley Art EST $4,000 - 6,000 At the time of his death in 2007, Hector Jandany had been creating his singular artworks for nearly 30 years, having become the oldest member of the Warmun artists at Turkey Creek. His decision to become an artist had sprung indirectly from his work with the Bough Shed School, which opened in 1979 at Warmun, and of which Hector was the director. It was here that he encouraged two-way learning, maintaining a firm belief in his instinctive knowledge of country whist having adopted a strong Christian belief.

Hector Jandanay gained renown for quirky figurative depictions and irregular hill formations rendered with an innate sense of spacial geometry. He would build the surface of his canvasses slowly and carefully treating the surface as if it were sacred, touching and rubbing his hand gently across it reverently. Hector’s preference for traditional ochres was significant. This tangible connection to land reflected Hector’s commitment to maintaining his spiritual obligations.

Hector produced a steady and consistent body of significant work.

He lived to become the last of the grand old pioneers of the painting movement at Warmun.

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LOT #69

LOT #70

PADDY WAINBURRANGA FORDHAM (1932 - 2006)

BILLY NOLAN TJAPANGATI (c.1940 - 2003)

Balangjalngalan, Spirit Figure, 1989

Tingari Dreaming, 2003

294 x 16 x 14 cm natural earth pigments on carved hardwood (but-but)

46 x 152 cm each panel synthetic polymer paint on Belgian linen

PROVENANCE Mimi Arts and Crafts, Katherine, NT Cooee Art Gallery, NSW Private Collection, NSW

PROVENANCE Aboriginal Gallery of Dreamings, Vic Cat Nos. 9288, 9287, 9286 Hank Ebes Collection, Vic

EST $3,000 - 5,000

accompanied by a certificate booklet from Aboriginal Gallery of Dreamings for each artwork and images of the artist creating the artworks EST $7,000 - 9,000

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LOT #71

LOT #72

YALA YALA GIBBS TJUNGURRAYI (c.1928 - 1998)

YALA YALA GIBBS TJUNGURRAYI (c.1928 - 1998)

Tingari at Karrkurruntjintjana, 1994

Tingari, 1994

91 x 136 cm synthetic polymer paint on Belgian linen

122 x 122 cm synthetic polymer paint on Belgian linen

PROVENANCE Papunya Tula Artists, NT Cat. No. YY940120 Aboriginal Gallery of Dreamings, Vic Cat. No. 3290 Hank Ebes Collection, Vic

PROVENANCE Field Collected by Paul Walsh, NT Cat. No. YY941086 Aboriginal Gallery of Dreamings, Vic Cat. No. 9701 Hank Ebes Collection, Vic

accompanied by a certificate booklet from Aboriginal Gallery of Dreamings

accompanied by a certificate booklet from Aboriginal Gallery of Dreamings

EST $7,000 - 9,000

EST $6,000 - 9,000 AUSTRALIAN INDIGENOUS FINE ART AUCTION

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LOT #73

TURKEY TOLSON TJUPURRULA (1942 - 2001) Two Women Dreaming - Tingari Site, 1995 91 x 122 cm synthetic polymer paint on Belgian linen PROVENANCE Field Collected by Paul Walsh, NT Cat. No. 100495TT Aboriginal Gallery of Dreamings, Vic Cat. No. 4954 Hank Ebes Collection, Vic accompanied by a certificate booklet from Aboriginal Gallery of Dreamings EST $3,000 - 5,000

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LOT #74

MICK NAMARARI TJAPALTJARRI (1926 - 1998) Bandicoot, 1995 204 x 134 cm synthetic polymer paint on canvas PROVENANCE Yapa Art, NT Kimberley Art, Vic Cat. No. CO/KA_47 Private Collection, Vic accompanied by a certificate from Kimberley Art and photos of the artist with the artwork LITERATURE Cf. Caruana, W. Aboriginal Art,Thames and Hudson, New York, 1993 p. 114 and 117, pl. 98 for a related example depicting the same subject matter and iconography that was the winner of the 8th National Aboriginal Art Award in 1991 Cf. For another related example of this Dreaming see The Master from Marnpi, Mick Namarari Tjapaltjarri, Alec O’Halloran p190 and 191 EST $6,000 - 9,000

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LOT #75

LOT #76

MALCOLM MALONEY JAGAMARRA (1954)

WILLY TJUNGURRAYI (c.1932 - 2018)

Men’s Ceremony, 1990

Tingari Cycle, 1995

106 x 147 cm synthetic polymer paint on Belgian linen

92.5 x 121 cm synthetic polymer paint on Belgian linen

PROVENANCE Aboriginal Gallery of Dreamings, Vic Cat. No. MJ 2030 Hank Ebes Collection, Vic

PROVENANCE Field Collected by Paul Walsh, NT Cat. No. 120395WT Aboriginal Gallery of Dreamings, Vic Cat. No. 4097 Hank Ebes Collection, Vic

accompanied by a certificate booklet from Aboriginal Gallery of Dreamings EST $4,500 - 6,500

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accompanied by a certificate booklet from Aboriginal Gallery of Dreamings EST $5,000 - 7,000

LOT #77

LOT #78

TIMMY PAYUNGKA TJAPANGATI (1935 - 2000)

JOHN KIPARA TJAKAMARRA (1932 - 2002)

Tingari, 1993

Tingari, 1982

94 x 125 cm synthetic polymer paint on Belgian linen

90.5 x 121 cm synthetic polymer paint on Belgian linen

PROVENANCE Papunya Tula Artists, NT Cat. No. TP931277 Aboriginal Gallery of Dreamings, Vic Cat. No. 3681 Ebes Collection, Vic

PROVENANCE Papunya Tula Artists, NT Cat. No. TJ820824 Aboriginal Gallery of Dreamings, Vic Cat. No. 7115 Hank Ebes Collection, Vic

accompanied by a certificate booklet from Aboriginal Gallery of Dreamings and a certificate of authenticity from Papunya Tula Artists

Bears further Cat No. PT/30 NIWRI from unknown source

EST $6,000 - 8,000

accompanied by a certificate booklet from Aboriginal Gallery of Dreamings EST $7,000 - 9,000 AUSTRALIAN INDIGENOUS FINE ART AUCTION

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LOT #79

LOT #80

NYANYUMA NAPANGARDI (c.1940)

PEGGY PURVIS MPETYANE (c.1948)

Tingari Dreaming Cycle, 2003

Untitled (Women’s Ceremony), 1989

51 x 102 cm synthetic polymer paint on Belgian linen

151 x 122 cm synthetic polymer paint on canvas

PROVENANCE Yanda Art, NT Cat. No. NY200329 Aboriginal Gallery of Dreamings, Vic Cat. No. 9895 Hank Ebes Collection, Vic

PROVENANCE Aboriginal Gallery of Dreamings, Vic Cat. No. 150 Hank Ebes Collection, Vic

accompanied by a certificate booklet from Aboriginal Gallery of Dreamings and photos of the artist painting the artwork EST $600 - 800 88

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accompanied by a certificate booklet from Aboriginal Gallery of Dreamings EST $3,000 - 4,000

LOT #81

TJUNKIYA NAPALTJARRI (c.1927 - 2009) & WINTJIYA NAPALTJARRI (c.1923 - 2014) Women’s Dreaming at Mulpurringa and Umari, 1997 122 x 122 cm synthetic polymer paint on Belgian linen PROVENANCE Papunya Tula Artists, NT Cat. No. WN/TN970247 Aboriginal Gallery of Dreamings, Vic Cat. No. 7212 Ebes Collection, Vic accompanied by a certificate booklet from Aboriginal Gallery of Dreamings and a certificate of authenticity from Papunya Tula Artists EST $7,000 - 9,000

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LOT #82

NYURAPAYIA (MRS BENNETT) NAMPITJINPA (1935 - 2013) Kapi Tjukurrpa (Water Dreaming), 2007 153 x 122 cm synthetic polymer paint on Belgian linen PROVENANCE Yanda Art, NT Cat. No. MRSB200703 Private Collection, NSW accompanied by a certificate of authenticity from Yanda Art EST $20,000 - 30,000

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LOT #83

YANNIMA TOMMY WATSON (c.1935 - 2017) Irika, 2015 301 x 182 cm synthetic polymer paint on canvas PROVENANCE Yanda Art, NT Cat. No. TW201546 Private Collection, France EST $80,000 - 120,000 Pitjantjatjara elder Tommy Watson gained wide acclaim in an astonishingly short amount of time. His first works were created at the community arts centre in Irrunytju, 12 km south-west of the tri-state border where the Northern Territory, Western Australia, and South Australia meet. This was just 44 kilometres east of Anamarapiti, where he was born c.1935. Though he recalled visiting Papunya in his youth and observing the birth of the art movement there, he did not take up painting for another 30 years.

His debut at the 2002 Desert Mob exhibition in Alice Springs was followed by his participation in a series of group exhibitions from which his reputation gained momentum. His prominence as an artist of the highest renown was ultimately cemented when, in 2006, he was commissioned to create a permanent installation at Musee du Quai Branly, in Paris.

Grounded in his paintings are rockholes, mountain ranges, creekbeds, and important Dreaming sites created, according to the mythology of the region, during the major battle that took place between the White Cockatoo and the Eagle. In keeping with the depiction of Dreaming stories throughout the Western Desert, the landscape is rendered sacred and numinous through the actions of these mythic creator beings during its formation.

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EMILY KAME KNGWARREYE Though she painted for only 7 years, Emily Kame Kngwarreye 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’.

Comparisons with a number of great international artists including Pollock, Kandinsky, Monet, and Matisse had by then 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.

Emily first met white people as a young girl aged about nine. The adopted daughter of 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 though without children, she lived the final years of her life at Soakage Bore near the Sandover River, one of 14 small encampments of Anmatyerre and Alyawarre people in the Eastern Desert.

She was 79 years-of-age when, in 1987, she painted her first canvas. Rodney Gooch of the Central Australian Aboriginal Media Association (CAAMA) sold her first works through Utopia Art Gallery in Sydney, owned by Christopher Hodges. Shortly thereafter she began painting for Don and Janet Holt, who owned the nearby Delmore Cattle Station. They supplied works to Gabrielle Pizzi in Melbourne and later Judith Behan in Canberra and Cooee Art Gallery in Sydney. In 1990, Emily’s paintings were shown at the Art Gallery of New South Wales and she participated in the CAAMA/Utopia artists-in-residence program at the ICA in Perth.

After Hank Ebes opened his Aboriginal Gallery of Dreamings in Bourke Street, Melbourne, he purchased more than 94

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80 works by Emily through the Holts.

However, after falling out with them, Ebes commissioned Paul Walsh to collect works from Emily on his behalf, as well as for his partner at the time, Michael Hollows. When Tim Jennings built his Mbantua Gallery specialising in Utopia paintings, 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 the 1990s onwards was Fred Torres, the son of Emily’s 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. He organised painting workshops out on the Utopia lands, often funded by Ebes, who always insisted on being the first to see and select them. 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 of them, as once Emily had achieved notoriety there was an unending stream of buyers with blank canvases, keen to get a piece of the rising star. Emily could paint a number of paintings in a single day if everything was laid out, ready and waiting for her arrival.

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 the time. The second was 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 Emily.

If any single artist could be said to be the standard bearer for contemporary Indigenous painting, Emily must surely be the one. It is impossible to dispute the fact that, at their best, the paintings of Emily Kame Kngwarreye place her in the highest league of international artists of her time.

Yet, in spite of her international acclaim and the vast fortune that she earned and dispensed to her clanspeople, it is still possible to visualise Emily sitting by the Arlparra Store, under the large bloodwood Eucalypts. 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, and was largely oblivious to the art of international modernist masters with whom her work was constantly compared.

RELATED ARTWORKS LOTS 8, 24, 26, 30, 51, 53, 84, 85, 86, 97

LOT #84

EMILY KAME KNGWARREYE (1910 - 1996) My Country, 1995 152.5 x 122 cm synthetic polymer paint on Belgian linen PROVENANCE Aboriginal Gallery of Dreamings, Vic Cat. No. 5554 Ebes Collection, Vic accompanied by a certificate booklet from Aboriginal Gallery of Dreamings EST $80,000 - 120,000

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LOT #85

EMILY KAME KNGWARREYE (1910 - 1996) Alatyite (Spinifex) Dreaming, 1995 117 x 86.5 cm synthetic polymer paint on Belgian linen PROVENANCE Aboriginal Gallery of Dreamings, Vic Cat. No. 4533 Ebes Collection, Vic accompanied by a certificate booklet from Aboriginal Gallery of Dreamings and an image of the artist holding the artwork EST $25,000 - 35,000

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This painting is an aerial perspective of Emily’s country in the spring of 1992. From late 1991 onwards Emily explored a range of techniques having largely abandoned the fine dotting and submerged linear tracing which characterised her earlier works. She began using larger brushes to create broader circular dabs of paint which often involved ‘double dipping’ the brush in a second colour before applying the paint to the canvas. This technique enabled her to work vigorously, while making delicate flower-like impressions as are seen in this work of the period.

The work is fascinating in that it combines two different techniques that were to define her art thereafter.The floral impressions created by the double-dipped brush and the linear tracing that it eventually gave way for.

Alatyite is a common form of bush tucker. At Utopia, this small, spiky bush with spinifex-like characteristics, contains within its root system long tubers which are collected by the women and taken back to the camp where they are cooked and eaten. Alatyite is narrow in shape and reaches up to 15cm in height. It was one of Kngwarreye’s most important stories.

LOT # 86

EMILY KAME KNGWARREYE (1910 - 1996) My Country, 1995 92 x 91.5 cm synthetic polymer paint on canvas PROVENANCE Aboriginal Gallery of Dreamings, Vic Cat. No. 5386 Ebes Collection, Vic Signed verso ‘Emily’ accompanied by a certificate booklet from Aboriginal Gallery of Dreamings and a photo of the artist with the artwork EST $20,000 - 25,000

Reflected in this work is the Anooralya Yam, the most important plant in Emily’s custodianship. This hardy and fertile plant provides both a seed bearing flower called Kame (Emily’s tribal name) and an edible tuber. When plants mature and die off the tubers swell causing the ground to crack. The women of the Eastern Desert can always find them where cracks in the earth’s surface indicate their presence underground.

Emily’s application of red and yellow colours in this work highlights the varied and changing hues in the later part of the life cycle of the Anooralya Yam and other food plants found near Alalgura on Utopia Station. From an aerial perspective we see sporadic clustered growth after summer rain. We also look on this exciting work as a water catchment area.The rain falls and water slowly flows along the broad shallow watercourse and replenishes the soakage at Alalgura.

The flourish of growth that follows is exceptional and rapid.

Ceremony reinforces, through narrative, the significance of this knowledge, by teaching survival skills and knowledge, basic social codes and obligations to the future generation of Eastern Anmatjerre and Alyawerre women.

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LOT #87

MINNIE PWERLE (1910 - 2006) Awelye Atnwengerrp, 2004 180 x 91 cm synthetic polymer paint on Belgian linen PROVENANCE Dacou Gallery, SA Cat. No. 05917 Cicada Trading, Qld accompanied by a certificate of authenticity from Dacou Gallery EST $7,000 - 10,000

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LOT #88

LORNA NAPARRULA FENCER (c.1925 - 2006) Caterpillar, 2000 101.5 x 125 cm synthetic polymer paint on Belgian linen PROVENANCE Katherine Art Gallery, NT Cat. No. P-1282 Cooee Art Gallery, NSW Cat. No. #6199 Fireworks Gallery, Qld Cat. No. 2778 Aboriginal Gallery of Dreamings, Vic Cat. No. 8431 Hank Ebes Collection, Vic accompanied by a certificate booklet from Aboriginal Gallery of Dreamings EST $5,000 - 7,000

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LOT #89

LOT #90

PADDY JAPALJARRI STEWART (1935 - 2013)

JIMMY BAKER (1915 - 2010)

Walawurru Eagle Dreaming, 2002

Kanpi, 2005

91 x 101 cm synthetic polymer paint on Belgian linen

79 x 95 cm synthetic polymer paint on canvas

PROVENANCE Warlukurlangu Artists, NT Cat. No. 409/02 Cooee Art Gallery, NSW Cat. No. 982 Adrian and Anne Newstead Collection, NSW

PROVENANCE Ninuku Artists, SA Cat. No. NKUJB05238 Private Collection, WA Cooee Art, NSW

accompanied by a certificate of authenticity from Warlukurlangu Artists

accompanied by a certificate of authenticity from Ninuku Artists

EST $2,500 - 3,500

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EST $3,500 - 4,500

LOT #91

LOT #92

SUSIE NAPALTJARRI BOOTJA BOOTJA (c.1932 - 2003)

FRED TJAKAMARRA (1926 - 2006)

Untitled (Tjaluwon), 1993

Water Dreaming at Yuntu, 1995

59.5 x 119 cm | frame 65.5 x 123.5 cm synthetic polymer paint on canvas

80 x 120 cm | frame 86 x 126 cm synthetic polymer paint on Belgian linen

PROVENANCE Warlayirti Artists, Balgo Hills, WA Cat. No. 75/93 Gifted to the art co-ordinator Robin Beasey by the artist in February 1993 Aboriginal Gallery of Dreamings, Vic Cat. No. 12460 Hank Ebes Collection, Vic

PROVENANCE Warlayirti Artists, Balgo Hills, WA Cat. No. 826/95 Aboriginal Gallery of Dreamings, Vic Cat. No. 5488 Ebes Collection, Vic

accompanied by a certificate booklet from Aboriginal Gallery of Dreamings

EST $4,000 - 6,000

EST $3,500 - 4,500 AUSTRALIAN INDIGENOUS FINE ART AUCTION

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LOT #93

JOHNNY WARNANGKULA TJUPURRULA (1925 - 2001) Men’s Ceremony, 1999 153 x 91 cm synthetic polymer paint on Belgian linen PROVENANCE Field Collected by Paul Walsh, NT Cat. No. JW997KD Aboriginal Gallery of Dreamings, Vic Cat. No. 7819 Hank Ebes Collection, Vic accompanied by a certificate booklet from Aboriginal Gallery of Dreamings EST $5,000 - 7,000

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Born in the far reaches of the Western Desert, Johnny Warangkula encountered the outside world at just 12 years of age. Within three years his family moved in to Hermannsburg mission where he went through initiation and moved to Papunya shortly after its establishment. At the time of Geoff Bardon’s arrival in 1971 he was serving on the Papunya Council alongside Mick Namarari.

Warangkula was amongst the most inventive of the early Papunya artists and was foremost amongst those who fundamentally shaped the Papunya art movement. However by the mid 1980s his eyesight began to fail and his painting became infrequent. By the end of the 1990s Warangkula was old and relatively infirm. Yet even at this late stage he was capable of creating raw expressionistic paintings such as this fine example.

The finest of Johnny Waralgkula’s works continue to inspire. Over his thirty-year career, he was a distinctive figure, always wearing his stockman’s hat and charming visitors with his enigmatic but sincere personality. He was oblivious to the attractions of life beyond the power and responsibilities of his Dreamings. Yet his best paintings not only reverberate with the power of ancient knowledge and forms, but they continue to captivate Western audiences through their uncanny access to our modern sensibility.

LOT #94

LOT #95

PADDY TJAPALTJARRI SIMS (c.1925 - 2010)

POLLY NGAL (1936 - )

Marla Jukurrpa (Rock Wallaby Dreaming), 2006

Bush Plum, 2005

106 x 121 cm synthetic polymer paint on belgian linen

92 x 123 cm synthetic polymer paint on Belgian linen

PROVENANCE Warlukurlangu Artists, NT Cat. No. 1144/06 Cooee Art Gallery, NSW Cat. No. 3172 Adrian and Anne Newstead Collection, NSW

PROVENANCE Lauraine Diggins Fine Art, Vic Cat. No. 250166 Private Collection, Vic

accompanied by a certificate of authenticity from Warlukurlangu Artists

EXHIBITED Australian Aboriginal Art: DFAT Olympic Exhibition, Sao Paolo and Rio de Janiero, Brazil, 2014

EST $4,000 - 6,000

EST $4,500 - 6,500 AUSTRALIAN INDIGENOUS FINE ART AUCTION

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LOT #96

EMILY PWERLE (c.1922 - ) Awelye-Atnwengerrp, 2008 193 x 141 cm synthetic polymer paint on Belgian linen PROVENANCE Boomerang Art, SA Cat. No. 5392 Cooinda Gallery, NSW Private Collection, NSW Accompanied by a certificate of authenticity from Boomerang Art and a photo of the artist with the artwork EXHIBITED Contemporary Aboriginal Art, Coffs Harbour Regional Gallery, NSW, August - September 2009 EST $7,000 - 9,000

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Emily Pwerle began painting during a workshop held at Ultja station in 2004. Her extended family are all artists, including her sister, the late Minnie Pwerle, her other sisters Molly and Gayla, and Minnie’s daughter Barbara Weir. Minnie Pwerle, who began painting in 1999, took a close and supportive role in the development of her younger sisters when they began painting 5 years later.

This bold linear pattern of intertwined stripes and curves represents the Women’s Ceremony body paint design and evokes its shimmer as women dance by firelight. After smearing their bodies with animal fat, the women trace these designs onto their breasts, arms and thighs, singing as each woman taker her turn being ‘painted up’.

The songs relate to the Dreamtime stories of Ancestral Travel and other plants, animals, and natural forces. Awelye - Women’s Ceremony - demonstrates respect for the land. In performing these ceremonies, the women ensure well being and happiness within the communities. Atnwengerrp is Emily Pwerle’s Country.

LOT #97

EMILY KAME KNGWARREYE (1910 - 1996) Summer Abundance V, 1993 120.5 x 91 cm synthetic polymer paint on Belgian linen PROVENANCE Delmore Gallery, NT Cat. No. 93A76 The Thomas Vroom Collection, The Netherlands Ebes Collection, Vic EXHIBITED Schittering/Brilliance, AAMU - Museum for Contemporary Aboriginal Art, Utrecht, The Netherlands, 12 October 2007 - 23 March 2008 EST $40,000 - 60,000

The Anooralya Yam plant is Emily Kngwarreye’s main totem and story and has characteristics that make it an important food staple in the arid lands north-east of Alice Springs. Its ability to keep relatively fresh after picking, and to keep well underground is highly valued. The yam flower and the seeds it contains are a preferred food of the Emu. These can be processed into a seed cake . As for the yam, ‘it always comes back’ - a very telling statement in the harsh desert environment. Emily’s double-dipped brushwork celebrates the presence of food underground.

This is a fine example of Emily painting in anticipation of the completion of ceremonies being held in her country Alalgura during the summer of 1993. Many of her greatest paintings were created during the ceremonial season as women dance to ensure that there will be abundance during the year ahead.

Emily Kame Kngwarreye is widely regarded as Australia’s most important and successful Aboriginal artist. Her remarkable career lasted just 7 years until her passing at 86 years of age in 1996. The painterly quality and originality of her works extended her influence far beyond the reach of Aboriginal art, attracting an international audience ready to acclaim her new and innovative style which remains as popular today as they did almost 25 years ago.

AUSTRALIAN INDIGENOUS FINE ART AUCTION

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LOT #98

LOT #99

JIMMY DONEGAN (1940 - )

WINTJIYA NAPALTJARRI (1923 - 2014)

Pukara, 2005

Watanuma, 1998

98 x 151 cm synthetic polymer paint on canvas

45 x 91 cm synthetic polymer paint on Belgian linen

PROVENANCE Papulankutja Artists, WA Cat. No 05-979 Aboriginal and Pacific Art, NSW Private Collection, NSW

PROVENANCE Papunya Tula Artists, NT Cat. No. WN9808229 Aboriginal Gallery of Dreamings, Vic Cat. No. 7237 Ebes Collection, Vic

Accompanied by original Papulankutja Artists documentation

accompanied by a certificate booklet from Aboriginal Gallery of Dreamings and a certificate of authenticity from Papunya Tula Artists

EST $4,500 - 6,500

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EST $1,200 - 1,400

LOT #100

LOT #101

ANATJARI TJAMPITJINPA (1927 - 1999)

NANCY ROSS NUNGURRAYI (1935 - 2009)

Kuniya Kutjarra (Two Pythons), 1997

Women’s Dreaming, 2003

61 x 122 cm synthetic polymer paint on Belgian linen

90 x 121 cm synthetic polymer paint on Belgian linen

PROVENANCE Papunya Tula Artists, NT Cat. No. AT970225 Aboriginal Gallery of Dreamings, Vic Cat. No 6854 Hank Ebes Collection, Vic

PROVENANCE Aboriginal Gallery of Dreamings, Vic Cat. No. 12777 Hank Ebes Collection, Vic

accompanied by a copy of the Papunya Tula certificate and a certificate booklet from Aboriginal Gallery of Dreamings EST $4,000 - 6,000

accompanied by a certificate booklet from Aboriginal Gallery of Dreamings EST $3,000 - 5,000

AUSTRALIAN INDIGENOUS FINE ART AUCTION

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LOT #102

TJAWINA PORTER NAMPITJINPA (1950 - ) Untitled, 2007 183 x 153 cm synthetic polymer paint on Belgian linen PROVENANCE Art Equity, NSW Private Collection, NSW Nanda/Hobbs, NSW Private Collection, NSW EST $5,000 - 7,000

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LOT #103

LOT #104

TJAWINA PORTER NAMPITJINPA (1950 - )

NYANYUMA NAPANGARDI (c.1940 - )

Tingari Dreaming Cycle, 2004

Tingari Dreaming Cycle, 2003

101.5 x 112 cm synthetic polymer paint on Belgian linen

61 x 91 cm synthetic polymer paint on Belgian linen

PROVENANCE Papunya Tula Artists, NT Cat. No. TPN200423 Aboriginal Gallery of Dreamings, Vic Cat. No. 10046 Hank Ebes Collection, Vic

PROVENANCE Yanda Art, NT Cat. No. NYA200330 Aboriginal Gallery of Dreamings, Vic Cat. No. 9901 Hank Ebes Collection, Vic

accompanied by a certificate booklet from Aboriginal Gallery of Dreamings and an images of the artist creating the artwork

accompanied by a certificate booklet from Aboriginal Gallery of Dreamings and photos of the artist painting the artwork

EST $2,500 - 3,500

EST $1,800 - 2,200 AUSTRALIAN INDIGENOUS FINE ART AUCTION

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LOT #105

LOT #106

NARPULA SCOBIE NAPURRULA (c.1950 - )

BENNY TJAPALTJARRI (c.1932 - 2003)

Women’s Ceremony, 1998

Wilkinkarra, 1998

60 x 91.5 cm synthetic polymer paint on Belgian linen

61 x 91 cm synthetic polymer paint on Belgian linen

PROVENANCE Aboriginal Gallery of Dreamings, Vic Cat. No. 7487 Hank Ebes Collection, Vic

PROVENANCE Papunya Tula Artists, NT Cat. No. BT980895 Aboriginal Gallery of Dreamings, Vic Cat. No. 7322 Hank Ebes Collection, Vic

accompanied by a certificate booklet from Aboriginal Gallery of Dreamings and a photo of the artist with the artwork EST $700 - 900

accompanied by an original certificate from Papunya Tula artists and a booklet from Aboriginal Gallery of Dreamings EST $2,500 - 3,500

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LOT #107

LOT #108

MICK NAMARARI TJAPALTJARRI (1926 - 1998)

PATRICK OLOODOODI TJUNGURRAYI (c.1935 - 2017)

Kungka Kutjara Playing Love Magic Game (Munni Munni) atYkalke, 1995

Tingari at Wirrilpi, 2000

91 x 122 cm synthetic polymer paint on Belgian linen

61 x 91 cm synthetic polymer paint on Belgian linen

PROVENANCE Field Collected by Paul Walsh, NT Cat. No. 100495MN Aboriginal Gallery of Dreamings, Vic Cat. No. 4951 Hank Ebes Collection, Vic

PROVENANCE Papunya Tula Artists, NT Cat. No. PT0008136 Kimberley Art, Vic Private Collection, Vic

accompanied by a certificate booklet from Aboriginal Gallery of Dreamings and a photo of the artist with the artwork

accompanied by a certificate of authenticity from Papunya Tula Artists

EST $3,000 - 5,000

EST $1,000 - 1,500

AUSTRALIAN INDIGENOUS FINE ART AUCTION

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LOT #109

NYUJU STUMPY BROWN (1924 - 2011) My Country - Ngupawarlu, 2005 73 x 51 cm | frame 96 x 76 cm synthetic polymer paint on paper PROVENANCE Mangkaja Ats, Fitzroy Crossing, WA Kimberley Art, Vic Private Collection, Vic This work was a Finalist in the 2005 Kimberley Art Prize EST $1,000 - 1,500

LOT #110

JUKUJA DOLLY SNELL (c.1933 - 2015) Jilla and Jilji, 2012 88.5 x 60 cm | frame 91 x 63 cm synthetic polymer paint on canvas PROVENANCE Mangkaja Arts, WA Cat. No. 318/12 Private Collection, Vic EST $3000 - 4000

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BUYING FROM COOEE ART MARKETPLACE AUCTIONS BIDDING

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A buyer’s premium of 20% (plus GST) is added to the hammer price on each lot.The hammer price is the amount of the highest bid accepted by the auctioneer in relation to the lot.

AUSTRALIAN INDIGENOUS FINE ART AUCTION

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BIDDER FORM

Auction Title & # #7 Australian Indigenous Fine Art Auction 20 October 2020

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