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• Auction House:
  Mossgreen
• Sale Name:
  Important Art
• Sale Date:
  20 Nov 2017 ~ 6.30pm
• Lot #:
  15
• Lot Description:
  Emily Kame Kngwarreye
  (circa 1910-1996)
  Wildflower Dreaming: Dry Season, (1995)
  synthetic polymer paint on linen
  240 x 600 cm (6 panels, 203 x 120 cm each)
  signed verso: EmIly
• Provenance:
  DACOU Gallery, Adelaide (SS119788); Private collection, Adelaide; Lauraine Diggins Fine Art, Melbourne; Private collection, Melbourne
• Exhibited:
  Earth’s Creations, The Paintings of Emily Kame Kngwarreye, Lauraine Diggins Fine Art, 9 September - 10 October 1998
• References:
  Daniel Thomas, Earth’s Creations, The Paintings of Emily Kame Kngwarreye, Malakoff Fine Art Press, Melbourne, 1998, p.13-14 (double page fold-out)
• Notes:
  Wildflower Dreaming: Dry Season (1995) is a masterpiece in the oeuvre of the Emily Kame Kngwarreye. At 2.4 by 6 meters, assembled using six canvas stretchers, it ranks amongst her most monumental paintings. The work was fist exhibited in Lauraine Diggins Fine Art’s Earth’s Creations: the paintings of Emily Kame Kngwarreye. That exhibition of Emily’s work remains one the most influential commercial shows ever organised. Among others, the show included Earth’s Creation, painted in the same year as the present work, which sold through Lawson-Menzies in 2007 for a record breaking $1,056,000. It set the highest price ever paid at auction for a work by an Australian woman artist. Few artists have the stamina, skill or courage to produce a work on such a scale. Despite her advancing years – Emily was well into her eighties when she created this work – she had a tremendous reserve of energy required to execute a composition of this scale. Perhaps it had something to do with her late start in painting. Knowing she was in the autumn of her years, her limited time, combined with a wealth of traditional knowledge as a community elder, meant she had a lot to say and little time to say it. From the moment Rodney Gooch arrived in Utopia as an advisor to a Central Australian Aboriginal arts-development agency in 1998, where he set up a batik making project, Emily’s output was consistently prodigious. Of Emily’s early batik work, Anne Marie Brody commented how ‘there was a celebratory air … and an expressiveness that one did not encounter in the other desert art, particularly men’s work with its orientation towards very formal design structures … Utopia work possessed variety, vitality and an aesthetic freedom, including a willingness to experiment.1 These early works, in this first medium, captured the imagination of collectors and collecting museums in Australia and abroad. The rapid success fuelled the creative imagination of the Utopia artists and none benefitted more from this wave of belated cultural and artistic recognition than the genial Emily. She, and other artists in the community, moved onto painting with canvas following the advice of Rodney Gooch, finding original progress and appreciation in the new medium of acrylic paint on canvas. Emily painted for various sources over her short painting career. Wildflower Dreaming: Dry Season (1995) was painted for DACOU in Adelaide, for whom she had a strong family connection. Wildflower Dreaming: Dry Season (1995) is Emily’s country, her Dreaming and her song in all its colourful and botanical richness. There is a joyously vibrant quality to the surface that speaks of a deep intimate knowledge of the land, ceremonial and ritual culture relating to ‘women’s business’. Painted after she he had abandoned fine dot work, the present masterwork is made up thousands of juxtaposing, overlapping and interloping series of complex and thick dabs and blots. Combining a palette of rosy pinks, ochry yellows, warm whites and soft browns, Wildflower Dreaming is a celebration of Emily’s country in all its seasonal glory. The work has remained in the one collection since 1998. A tour de force that has few parallels in Australian or international contemporary art, Wildflower Dreaming: Dry Season (1995) is one of the most important works by the artist to come to the auction market since the record breaking sale of Earth’s Creation in 2007. Petrit Abazi 1 Anne Marie Brody, in Margo Neale (ed.), Emily Kame Kngwarreye: Alhalkere: Paintings from Utopia, Queensland Art Gallery and Macmillan, Brisbane and Melbourne, 1998, p. 15
• Estimate:
  A$200,000 - 300,000
• Realised Price:
  *****
  

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• Category:
  Art

This Sale has been held and this item is no longer available. Details are provided for information purposes only.