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• Auction House:
  Deutscher and Hackett
• Sale Name:
  Important Indigenous Art
• Sale Date:
  25 May 2016 ~ 7pm
• Lot #:
  22
• Lot Description:
  Emily Kame Kngwarreye
  (c.1910 – 1996)
  Untitled, 1992
  synthetic polymer paint on canvas
  122.0 x 151.5 cm
  bears inscription verso: artist’s name and Delmore Gallery cat. 92A08
• Provenance:
  Commissioned by Delmore Gallery, via Alice Springs; Gene and Brian Sherman collection, Sydney
• Notes:
  This bright and striking early painting by Emily Kngwarreye conveys the drama and fertility of the desert landscape nurtured by the summer rains. Painted in the summer wet of 2001-2002, Untitled, 1992 is one of a series of paintings undertaken that season which celebrate the life-giving forces of nature, and the metaphorical equivalents in spiritual and human terms – recurring themes throughout the artist's body of work. Significantly, Untitled, 1992 was created at a time when Kngwarreye’s painting was itself undergoing a process of transformation, with the artist abandoning the background tracery of the underlying yam roots, a consistent compositional device in her earlier paintings and transitioning instead into fields of pure dots. This was also a time when Kngwarreye experimented with colour and broadened her palette beyond traditional colours and their derivatives, to incorporate brighter hues such as blues, reds, greens, and in this case, vivid yellows and pinks. Kngwarreye suggests not only a sense of delight in the colours of the landscape; rather, now colour itself becomes both the impetus for – and subject of – such paintings. Emily's painting career began in the late 1980s, and in the years until her death in 1996, she produced a body of work which radically altered the way in which we see and understand modern Aboriginal art. For most of her life she had little contact with the outside world, and thus her painting is homage to the country she knew intimately. While much has been made of the way in which we might view her work in parallel with modern, non-indigenous abstraction, we must first recognize her achievement as a truly inventive and original contribution to Aboriginal art. CRISPIN GUTTERIDGE
• Estimate:
  A$40,000 - 60,000
• 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.