EMILY KAME KNGWARREYE 1910-1996 | Anooralya

Painted at Delmore Downs Station, Northern Territory for the Delmore Gallery in September 1995
Stefano Spaccapietra Collection, Switzerland

Synthetic polymer paint on linen, stretched, unlined and unframed. Bears artists name and Delmore Gallery catalogue number 92I017 on reverse. Please note, the work is slightly loose in its stretcher and would benefit from being re-stretched. there is some minor cracking to the paint in the upper right hand corner, the longest crack measuring approximately 2cm long. Otherwise, the work appears to be in excellent condition with no visible evidence of repair or restoration.
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By 1995 the fields of dotting that had been the hallmark of Emily Kame Kngwarreye’s paintings to date began to yield to elaborations on linear designs that originated as the compositional foundations of her paintings. The dots began to disappear from her work. Nonetheless, from time to time Kngwarreye would revisit earlier styles of painting at the behest of collectors and her agents: the practice allowed her to re-contextualize the late line paintings within the body of her work. Although painted in September 1995, Anooralya has more in common stylistically with paintings from 1993 such as the multi-paneled The Alhalkere Suite in the collection of the National Gallery of Australia,¹ and After Rain Summer and Winter Abstraction.² These paintings feature an effusion of colour that is atmospheric; Anooralya in particular, where the high key tones create an ephemeral sense of lightness that recalls the patchwork of brightly coloured wild flowers that appear in the early desert spring. WC

1 The Alhalkere Suite, 1993, is illustrated in Neale, M (ed), Emily Kame Kngwarreye. Paintings from Utopia, Queensland Art Gallery and Macmillan, Brisbane, 1998, Plate 71, catalogue number 63, pp.112-3; in Neale, M. et al, Emily Kame Kngwarreye. Utopia: The Genius of Emily Kame Kngwarreye, The National Museum of Art, Osaka, 2008, Plate C-7, pp.156-7; and Susan Hall (ed), Australian Art in the National Gallery of Australia, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 2002, pp384-385