EMILY KAME KNGWARREYE (EMILY KAM KNGWARRAY) (1910 - 1996)
Alalgura (My Country), 1
994
89.5 x 151 cm; 93.5 x 154.5 cm (framed)
acrylic on linen
Estimate: $140,000 - $160,000
PROVENANCE
Delmore Gallery, NT Cat No. 94J004
Australian & Oceanic Art Gallery, Qld
Private collection, SA
Accompanied by a certificate of authenticity from Delmore Gallery
Anmatyerr woman Emily Kame Kngwarreye (Emily Kam Kngwarray) was born in Alhalker on the edge of Utopia cattle station. Preceding the start of her professional painting career in the late 1980’s, she worked as a batik artist for 10 years. Her career as a painter was as prolific as it was passionate; after only a
few short years she had established herself internationally. She died in September 1996 leaving behind a profound and invaluable legacy which continues to grow.
Emily Kame Kngwarreye, often referred to simply as ‘EMILY,’ had her name adjusted to Emily Kam Kngwarray ahead of the National Gallery of Australia’s 2023 retrospective. This contentious new spelling, described as aligning with “the most up-to-date conventions” will also feature in the artist’s solo retro-spective at the Tate Modern in London, scheduled for July 2025.
Kngwarreye moved through a series of artistic periods in her short yet prolific eight-year career. From 1989 until 1991 she painted intimate tracking and animal prints interspersed under fine, sharp-dotted colour fields. These highly prized early works gave way to running dotted lines over ethereal landscapes consisting of parallel horizontal and vertical stripes representing ceremonial body painting. By 1993, she was painting floral images in a profusion of colour by double dipping brushes into layers of paint. In 1995 and 1996 Kngwarreye’s painting series ‘Anooralya (Yam)’ and ‘Sacred Grasses’ show her lineal body painting imagery yield to scrambling yam roots. Kngwarreye’s ‘Final Seres’ consisting of 24 revelatory canvases painted with large flat brushes just two
weeks before her passing in 1996.
While her preoccupation was with both the life cycle of the yam and the women’s ceremonies celebrating its importance, Emily painted many interrelated themes using these subjects to illustrate her country as a whole. In an interview with Rodney Gooch, translated by Kathleen Petyarre, Knwarreye described her subject as
‘Whole lot, that’s all, whole lot, awelye, arlatyeye, ankerrthe, ntange, dingo, ankerre, intekwe, anthwerle and kame. That’s what I paint: whole lot. My Dreaming, pencil yam, mountain devil lizard, grass seed, dingo, emu, small plant emu food, green bean and yam seed.’
Posthumously, Kngwarreye’s phenomenal oeuvre was chronologically curated in Margo Neale’s groundbreaking exhibition, ‘Utopia: The Genius of Emily Kngwarreye’ at the National Museum of Australia in 2007 and The National Gallery of Tokyo in 2008. Her mammoth ‘Earth’s Creation I’ was selected by Okwui Enwezor to be exhibited at the Venice Biennale in 2015. In recent years, Kngwarreye’s work has experienced a further surge, in part due to a host of commercial and institutional exhibitions, including ‘Emily Kam Kngwarray’
curated by Hettie Perkins and Kelli Cole for the NGA and ‘Emily: Desert Painter’ held at the influential Gagosian Gallery Paris in 2023.
The four mid-career works offered in this auction (Lots 1, 9, 17 and 72) are excellent examples of Kngwarreye’s work for Delmore Gallery, each a luminous celebration of her country. With her status as an elder and senior law holder of Country during a seminal time in social history, works of this calibre are becoming increasingly important to her artistic legacy. These works pay reverence to the sacredness of the Earth, the seasons, vegetation, her spiritual ancestors, and the ceremonies that Emily Kame Kngwarreye engaged with in her daily life.
