EMILY KAME KNGWARREYE 1910-1996 | Ndorkwa- Wild Plum

Painted at Delmore Downs Station, Northern Territory for the Delmore Gallery in the first half of 1989
Aboriginal Art From Utopia, Gallery Gabrielle Pizzi, Melbourne, Victoria, 1989
Private Collection, Melbourne, acquired from the above, the artist's first exhibition with Gallery Gabrielle Pizzi
Sotheby's, Contemporary and Aboriginal Art, Melbourne, 18 June 1995, lot 244
Stefano Spaccapietra Collection, Switzerland

Please note, this work is synthetic polymer paint on canvas, stretched, unlined and unframed. The works appears to be in excellent condition overall with no visible signs of repair or restoration. Bears artist's name together with Delmore Gallery catalogue number AA017 on reverse.
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The first exhibition of paintings from Utopia was mounted at one of Sydney’s leading public art spaces, the S.H. Ervin Gallery, in April 1989. The exhibition, Utopia Women’s Paintings: The First Works on Canvas. A Summer Project, was coordinated by the Central Australian Aboriginal Media Association (CAAMA) in Alice Springs that had previously instigated a number of art projects with the artists of Utopia. The project and the exhibition were underwritten by the Holmes à Court Collection in Perth. The exhibition featured Emily Kame Kngwarreye’s earliest paintings on canvas that were made in the Australian summer of 1988-89. Ndorkwa, Wild Plum was painted on Delmore Downs Station in the first half of 1989; it was the second painting by Kngwarreye for the Delmore Gallery that, along with CAAMA, was to become one of the artist’s leading agents. Ndorkwa, Wild Plum features an overall pattern of dotting that represents the yam or bush potato anatye and the wild plum ndorkwa over a linear organic grid that is based on the growth of the yam roots underground. The grid coalesces the composition in Kngwarreye’s early paintings, a feature that was evident in some of her batiks and that she continued to use practically throughout her painting career. The grid echoes the traditional compositional structures of desert ceremonial paintings constructed of journey lines joining sacred sites usually depicted as roundels. Other paintings from the period that feature dotting over a linear matrix include Emu woman, 1988-89, in the Janet Holmes a Court Collection, and Anatye (Wild Potato), 1989, in the collection of the National Gallery of Victoria.¹

WC

1 Emu Woman, 1988-89, is illustrated in Boulter, M., The Art of Utopia: A New Direction in Contemporary Aboriginal Art, Craftsman House, Sydney, 1991, p.66, plate 11, and in Neale, M (ed), Emily Kame Kngwarreye. Paintings from Utopia, Queensland Art Gallery and Macmillan, Brisbane, 1998, p.16, catalogue number 7, plate 8. Anatye (Wild Potato), 1989, is illustrated in Isaacs, J. et al., Emily Kngwarreye Paintings, Craftsman House, Sydney, 1998, Plate 1, p.44