EMILY KAME KNGWARREYE

Commissioned by Delmore Gallery in 1989
Collection of Gallery Gabrielle Pizzi, Melbourne
Sotheby's, Important Aboriginal Art, 29 June 1998, lot 36
Private collection, USA

Emily Kame Kngwarreye, Gallery Gabrielle Pizzi, Melbourne
Cross Roads - Towards a New Reality: Aboriginal Art from Australia, The National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto, September 22 - November 8, 1992; The National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, November 17 - December 20, 1992, cat. no. 76
Emily Kame Kngwarreye, Alkalkere - Paintings from Utopia, Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane, 20 February - 13 April 1998; The Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 15 May - 19 July 1998; The National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 8 september - 22 November, 1998, cat. no. 48

Emily Kame Kngwarreye, Gallery Gabrielle Pizzi, Melbourne, 1990, exh. cat. O'Ferrall, M.A. et al, Crossroads - Towards a New Reality: Aboriginal Art from Australia, The National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto, 1992, p.94, illus.
Neale, M. et al, Emily Kame Kngwarreye, Alhalkere: Paintings from Utopia, p.48, pl.28, cat. no.48, illus.
McCulloch, S., Contemporary Aboriginal Art: A Guide to the Rebirth of an Ancient Culture, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 2001, pp. 88-9, illus.

The painting is in good condition overall with no repairs or restoration. The painting is housed in a contemporary minimalist dark brown frame.
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This highly accomplished and resolved work was made in the first year in which the artist commenced painting on canvas. It is clearly the result of decades of painting experience in the ceremonial context, where Kngwarreye was a ritual leader, and in the practice of batik making that she undertook for the decade prior to taking up acrylic paint and canvas

The underlying graphic structure of her early paintings is clearly evident in this work, serving to anchor the fields of dotting that float across the surface of the work to create a sense of movement and depth that metaphorically reflects the presence of ancestral forces within the landscape depicted, and within the painting as well. The ancestral Emu is depicted at Alhalkere (Alalgura), her grandfather's country on which Knwgarreye was born and the place from where she derives her identity as an individual, and is most often the subject of her work

The tracery of the compositional background of these early paintings is most often based loosely on the wandering lines of the roots of the yam plant. The line work tends to be free and intuitive and not bound by the conventional graphic icons of desert painting. In her early paintings, however, Kngwarreye would occasionally draw conventional desert motifs such as the tracks of the ancestral Emu as in this painting – the arrow-like shapes that wonder down the centre right of the picture. Similar works from the period include Untitled (Country with Emu Tracking), 1990, and Awelye, 1989, both illustrated in Neale, 1998, p.73, pl.41, cat. no. 29, and p.67, pl.35, cat. no.10 respectively, illus.