Emily Kame Kngwarreye

VH-ZND Boeing 787-9 Dreamliner, Qantas aircraft is named Emily Kame Kngwarreye and painted in a special livery based on her work Yam Dreaming

Kngwarreye was born c.1910 on Alhalkere (Utopia Station),[3] and was a member of the Anmatyerre language group. Anmatyerre and Alywarre peoples in the eastern part of Central Australia living in 20 small Aboriginal communities form what is called Utopia, which is located about 250 kilometres north-east of Alice Springs.[4]

Kngwarreye is from a traditional family, and is the youngest of three children.[5] She had one brother and one sister, and no children of her own. Her brother's children are Gloria Pitjana Mills and Dolly Pitjana Mills.[6] Her sister-in-law was Minnie Pwerle, mother of artist Barbara Weir, whom Kngwarreye partly raised. Her great niece is the painter Jeannie Pwerle.[7]

Kngwarreye began painting with acrylic on canvass in late 1988 after over a decade of working in the batik medium.[3] She was a senior woman and over the next eight years produces an astonishing body of work that has endured and made her one of Australia's greatest artists.

Kngwarreye died in Alice Springs in September 1996.[3]

As an elder and ancestral custodian, Kngwarreye had for decades painted for ceremonial purposes in the Utopia region.[8] The flourishing of artists form this region is linked with the formation of the Utopia Women's Batik Group in 1977, Initially a communal project the batik making evolved and individual artists evolved their own individual styles.[4][9]

With 20 other women, she was introduced to the methods of tie-dye, block painting and batik at adult education classes at Utopia Station.[10] Kngwarreye was a foundational member of this group, and transitioned to acrylic in 1988.[11] She explains this transition in her own words, stating,

I did batik at first, and then after doing that I learned more and more and then I changed over to painting for good...Then it was canvas. I gave up on...fabric to avoid all the boiling to get the wax out. I got a bit lazy – I gave it up because it was too much hard work. I finally got sick of it ... I didn't want to continue with the hard work batik required – boiling the fabric over and over, lighting fires, and using up all the soap powder, over and over. That's why I gave up batik and changed over to canvas – it was easier. My eyesight deteriorated as I got older, and because of that I gave up batik on silk – it was better for me to just paint.[12]

Acrylic painting was introduced to the Utopia women in the summer of 1988/89 by Rodney Gooch, Art Co-ordinator for the women and manager of CAAMA Shop (Central Australian Aboriginal Media Association (CAAMA).[4] An exhibition of these paintings was held at the S H Ervin Museum in Sydney called "A Summer Project", where Kngwarreye's work got immediate attention from collectors and critics.[13] CAAMA Shop and Utopia Art Sydney placed seminal early paintings with the Holmes a'Court Collection and the National Gallery of Australia.

Whereas the predominant Aboriginal style was based on the one developed with some assistance from art teacher Geoffrey Bardon at the Papunya community in 1971 of many similarly sized dots carefully lying next to each other in distinct patterns, Kngwarreye created her own original artistic style. This first style, in her paintings between 1989 and 1991, had many dots, sometimes lying on top of each other, of varying sizes and colours, as seen in Wild Potato Dreaming (1996).[13] This style was popularised by the artists at Papunya Tula art centre, becoming known as "dot painting".

Initially Kngwarreye painted as part of the Utopia Womens collective for Rodney Gooch at CAAMA[14] and was then represented by Christopher Hodges, owner of Utopia Art Sydney, from 1988 to her death.[15]

Starting in April 1989,[16] Kngwarreye painted more than 1,500 works for Delmore Gallery, which was located at the Delmore Downs homestead adjacent to Utopia.[17] Delmore Downs operators Donald and Janet Holt supplied Kngwarreye's work to elite galleries in Australia and gifted works to institutions.[17]

By 1991 she was producing a range of work for numerous dealers such as the Aboriginal Gallery of Dreamings in Melbourne as well as Fred Torres of Dacou located in Adelaide.[18]

During her life, and after her death, authors and journalists reported that many of the works purportedly painted by Kngwarreye were, in fact, fakes.[19] In 1997, the N.T. News suggested an organised 'school' of painters had created works in her style.[19]

Kngwarreye's earlier works with Delmore Gallery provenance tend to perform best at auction[20] but experts believe her late-period works with Rodney Gooch provenance have significant market potential.[20]

Art-market journalist Gabriella Coslovich describes Delmore Gallery provenance as "prized".[21]

Untitled (1992) measures 120 x 150 cm and is an early example of the artist's use of large dots.

Kngwarreye went through many different individual styles in her short career. She worked within the tradition of Central desert painting where Johnny Warangkula Tjupurrula at Papunya may have pioneered the technique of overlaying masses of tiny dots to create the optical affect of a heat shimmer.[22] She also adhered to the conventions of Central desert painting in her adoption of an aerial perspective.[22]

In 1992, she began to join the dots into lines with parallel horizontal and vertical stripes, representing rivers and terrain, in many different colours.[23] She began using larger brushes than previously. Her later paintings were based on much larger dots than the finer, more intricate work which she did when she started.

In 1993 she began painting patches of colour along with many dots, which were like rings that were clear in the middle as seen in Alaqura Profusion (1993). This was made with a shaving brush that was called her 'dump dump' style, which used very bright colours. The same style of rings of colour are also seen in My Mothers Country and Emu Country (1994).

In 1995 she ended what critics called her 'colourist' phase and began painting with plain stripes that crossed the canvas.[24] The originally thick stripes often represented the lines of yam tracks, as in Yam Dreaming (1994) and Bush Yam (1995).[24] She expressed the strange growth patterns of the yam, a plant which was critical for human survival in the desert, but was very difficult to find.[24]

The success and demand for Kngwarreye's paintings caused her many problems within the community as she tried to maintain her individual identity. The myth of the woman in her 80s who had never been outside the central desert becoming a great painter was one reason for her popularity. She had in fact, been to Perth, Adelaide, Sydney and Canberra, though this was only after she had become famous. There was much pressure from the white community for her to paint in a certain way, when they believed that one of her styles was more successful than others.

In 1992, Kngwarreye was awarded an Australian Artist's Creative Fellowship by Prime Minister Keating & the Australia Council. She lived and worked at various places in the Sandover region including Atnarar and built a phenomenal reputation before her death in 1996.[5] In the following year, Kngwarreye, along with Yvonne Koolmatrie and Judy Watson were chosen to represent Australia at the Venice Biennale.[5]

In 1998, there was a major retrospective at Queensland Art Gallery in Brisbane, entitled "Emily Kame Kngwarreye: Alhalkere - Paintings from Utopia" and her batik was strongly represented in an exhibition "Raiki Wara: Long Cloth from Aboriginal Australia and the Torres Strait."[5]

Eight paintings by Kngwarreye in the Sotheby's winter auction of 2000 put together were sold for A$507,550, with Awelye (1989) selling for A$156,500. Also in 2000, Kngwarreye's work was amongst that of eight individual and collaborative groups of Indigenous Australian artists shown in the prestigious Nicholas Hall at the Hermitage Museum in Russia. The exhibition received a positive reception from Russian critics, one of whom wrote:

This is an exhibition of contemporary art, not in the sense that it was done recently, but in that it is cased in the mentality, technology and philosophy of radical art of the most recent times. No one, other than the Aborigines of Australia, has succeeded in exhibiting such art at the Hermitage.[26]

On 23 May 2007, her 1994 painting Earth's Creation was purchased by Tim Jennings of Mbantua Gallery & Cultural Museum for A$1,056,000 at a Deutscher-Menzies' Sydney auction, setting a record for an Aboriginal artwork at that time.[27] In 2017 Earth's Creation sold again for A$2,100,000 at a Cooee Art Gallery auction, breaking its own record.[28] Emily Kame Kngwarreye remains the highest selling Australian female artist.[29]

In 2018 the Tate Gallery London purchased three seminal Kngwarreye painting, the first indigenous artist to enter the collection.

Kngwarreye remains the leading Australian Artist on the world stage with works in major collections around the world.

Emily Kngwarreye was an intelligent and canny operator, and a proud elder in her community. She was enthusiastic to support her community and often painted works to service such debts. There is a body of work painted to these ends but when she was painting for exhibitions and with purpose, the work went to another level.

According to Sotheby's Tim Klingender, Kngwarreye was "an example of an Aboriginal artist who was relentlessly pursued by carpetbaggers towards the end of her career and produced a large but inconsistent body of work."[30]

With success came unwanted attention. Many other inexperienced art dealers would go to her community to try to get a piece of the action, Kngwarreye once describing to a friend how she had "escaped from five or six carloads of 'art dealers' at Utopia".

Kngwarreye's first solo exhibition was at Utopia Art Sydney in April 1990, and she was represented by Utopia Art Sydney throughout her career.[31] Utopia Art Sydney staged a major survey, STRONG, in March 2020 documenting her career with major works across their two locations.

Her work was included in a 1996 exhibition at Monash University Gallery called Women hold up half the sky: The orientation of art in the post-war Pacific.[32]

Kngwarreye's first retrospective was staged at the Queensland Art Gallery in 1998, curated by Margo Neale.[18] This exhibition was co-ordinated while Kngwarreye was still actively painting and a major work was commissioned for the opening. Opening at the QAG, it toured to the AGNSW, NGV and NGA. The second retrospective in 2008, again curated by Neale, opened at the National Gallery of Osaka, Japan, and toured to the National Gallery in Tokyo, and then on return to Australia it was shown at the National Museum of Australia.[33]

In 2013 the Emily Museum,[34] the first museum featuring a single Aboriginal artist, opened in Cheltenham, Victoria.[35]

• Australian Artist's Creative Fellowship, Australia Council, 1993.[36]
• Inducted into the Victorian Honour Roll of Women, 2001.[37]

• Australian art
• Indigenous Australian art

Notes

Sources

• Green, Jenny (2007). "Holding the country: art from Utopia and the Sandover". In Hetti Perkins; Margie West (eds.). One Sun One Moon: Aboriginal Art in Australia. Sydney: Art Gallery of New South Wales. ISBN 978-0-7347-6360-0.
• Ryan, Judith (2008). Across the Desert: Aboriginal Batik from Central Australia. Melbourne: National Gallery of Victoria. ISBN 978-0-7241-0299-0.

• Butler, Rex (1997), The Impossible Painter, Australian Art Collector magazine, issue 2, October – December 1997
• Coster, Peter (18 September 2009). "Watching the price of spirituality". Herald Sun. Melbourne. Retrieved 20 March 2020.
• Hart, D. (1995), Emily Kame Kngwarreye: Paintings from 1989–1995, Parliament House, Canberra
• Isaacs, J., Smith, T., Ryan, J., Holt, D., Holt, J. (1998), Emily Kngwarreye Paintings, Craftsman House, Smith, T. (Ed.). North Ryde, Sydney.
• McDonald, Gay; Fisher, Laura (June 2015). "Emily KameKngwarreye in Japan". Artlink. 35 (2): 48–51.
• Neale, M. (1998), Emily Kame Kngwarreye: Paintings from Utopia, Macmillan Publishers, South Yarra, Victoria.
• Neale, M. (2008), Utopia: The Genius of Emily Kame Kngwarreye, National Museum of Australia Press, Canberra.
• Thomas, D. (1988), Earth's Creation: The Paintings of Emily Kame Kngwarreye, Malakoff Fine Art Press, North Caulfield, Victoria.

• images of Kngwarreye's work on ArtNet
• Emily Kam Ngwarray at the Art Gallery of New South Wales
• Emily Kngwarreye at the National Gallery of Australia
• Emily Kngwarreye at the National Museum of Australia
• Emily Kngwarreye at the Museum Ludwig, Cologne, Germany
• Emily Kngwarreye on Design and Art Australia Online
• Emily Kame Kngwarreye review by Grafico Topico's Sue Smith