Emily Kame Kngwarreye circa 1910-1996

Painted on Delmore Downs Station, Northern Territory in January 1992
Delmore Gallery, catalogue number 92A23
Gallerie Australis, Adelaide, South Australia
Private collection, United Kingdom

Unframed. Stretched on a high quality stretcher. The painting is in excellent condition overall with no visible repairs or restorations.
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Cf. Jennifer Isaacs, et al., Emily Kngwarreye Paintings, Craftsman House, Sydney, 1998; Margo Neale (ed.) Emily Kame Kngwarreye – Alhalkere - Paintings from Utopia, Queensland Art Gallery and MacMillan, Brisbane, 1998; Margo Neale, Utopia: The Genius of Emily Kame Kngwarreye, National Museum of Australia Press, Canberra, 2008; Franchesca Cubillo and Wally Caruana, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art – Collection Highlights, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 2010, pp.72-5.

Franchesca Cubillo and Wally Caruana write with regard to the artist that she “is regarded as a phenomenon in Australian art. She worked with immense speed and assurance for an elderly woman, who it is popularly believed, started painting in her 70s – moving from batiks to acrylic on canvas in 1998. In a brief eight-year painting career Kngwarreye produced an extraordinary number of canvases, reputed to be as many as 3,000 – an average of a canvas a day. To the art world, both her output and her seemingly “abstract”, gestural style were unlike anything previously seen from an Aboriginal painter. Far from being an overnight sensation, however, Kngwarreye’s paintings are the culmination of a lifetime of making art for ceremonial purposes. By the time she took up a paintbrush and acrylic paints Kngwarreye was a truly experienced artist.” (ibid. p.72)