EMILY KAME KNGWARREYE | UNTITLED

Painted at Delmore Downs Station, Northern Territory in November 1990

Gallery Gabrielle Pizzi, Melbourne

Private Collection, United States

The Thomas Vroom Collection, The Netherlands

Pizzi, G., Aboriginal paintings from the desert : paintings by Australian Aboriginal artists from Papunya, Balgo Hills and Utopia, Gallery Gabrielle Pizzi, Melbourne, 1991, pp 68-69 (illus.)

Margo Neale, with contributions by Roger Benjamin et al., Emily Kame Kngwarreye : Alhalkere:paintings from Utopia, Queensland, 1998, p.60, cat.35, illus pl.51, p.84

Utopia: The Genius of Emily Kame Kngwarreye, National Museum of Australia; National Museum of Art, Osaka; National Art Center, Tokyo, The Yomiuri Shimbun, Tokyo, 2008, illus. pl.D-11, p.122

Margo Neale (ed.), Utopia: The Genius of Emily Kame Kngwarreye, National Museum of Australia; National Museum of Australia Press, 2008, p.94, illus. pp. 94-95

Created in November 1990, towards the end of the first year of Kngwarreye’s public career as a painter, 'Untitled' is a highly accomplished and resolved work that reflects a palimpsest of experience. In this painting, the veils of dotting are firmly anchored by an underlying compositional grid that owes its origins both to the patterns of the underground roots of the yam plant, and to the imagery found in narrative sand drawings as practiced by desert women. The combination of pictorial devices was to become the hallmark of Kngwarreye’s major paintings with the emphasis shifting between these foundational elements other over the years.

'Untitled,' 1990, features a change in the chromatic scale from Emily Kame Kngwarreye’s earlier paintings. In 1988 and 1989 her works featured the traditional palette of red and yellow ochre, black and white as seen in some of her major works from the period.¹ However, she soon began to modulate the color and tones introducing greys, purples and browns to create subtle shifts in intensity and to emphasize the visual depth of a painting, and to create effects that responded to an atmospheric landscape in such works as Untitled, 1990, and After Rain, painted earlier in 1990, in the collection of the National Gallery of Victoria.²  

1. See for example Emu Woman, 1988-89, in the Janet Holmes à Court Collection, and 'Ntange Dreaming', 1989, in the collection of the National Gallery of Australia in illustrated in Neale, M (ed), Emily Kame Kngwarreye. Paintings from Utopia, Queensland Art Gallery and Macmillan, Brisbane, 1998, plate 8, catalogue number 7, p. 16, and plate 40, catalogue number 11, p. 72 respectively. 

2. Isaacs, J. et al., Emily Kngwarreye Paintings, Craftsman House, Sydney, 1998, plate 7, p. 50.

Wally Caruana