Emily Kam Ngwarray
(Australia 1916–03 Sep 1996)
- Language group
- Anmatyerr, Central Desert region
- Title
- Untitled (Awelye)
- Other titles:
- Untitled (awelye)
- Place of origin
-
Central and Western Desert →
Northern Territory →
Australia
- Year
- 1994
- Media category
- Painting
- Materials used
- triptych: synthetic polymer paint on paper laminated to canvas
- Dimensions
-
100.7 x 213.0cm overall:
a - left panel; 100.7 x 71cm
b - centre panel; 100.7 x 71cm
c - right panel; 100.7 x 71cm
- Signature & date
- Not signed. Not dated.
- Credit
- Purchased 1994
- Accession number
- 567.1994.a-c
- Copyright
- © Emily Kam Ngwarray. Licensed by Viscopy, Sydney
- Location
- Not on display
- Further information
Working in a remote, north-west corner of the Simpson Desert, on land annexed by pastoral leases during the 1920s, Emily Kame Kngwarreye became, in the final decade of her life, perhaps the most celebrated and sought after Australian artist of her time.
A leading figure in eastern Anmatyerr ceremony, Kngwarreye was also the artist in whose work many white Australians first felt the force of an Indigenous art that could be seen to negotiate a space both within the aesthetics of Western abstraction and the timeless precepts of Aboriginal cultural traditions.
Kngwarreye's 'Untitled (Alhalker)', 1992, has been perceived as a lyrical mapping of country, a poeticising of the desert in bloom, or simply as a spectacular abstract painting. Alhalker, the desert country of Kngwarreye's birth, is anchored by a sacred rock in the form of a spectacular arched monolith, and shaped by the vagaries of the harsh desert environment. From the beginning, Alhalker remained the means and end of Kngwarreye's art.
Kngwarreye attained artistic maturity as a woman in her seventies, not long converted to the techniques of painting on canvas, but with decades of painting in a ceremonial context and activity with the Utopia Women's Batik Group behind her – as well as life as a camel handler and stockhand. In an extraordinarily prolific eight years of professional painting, she produced magnificent canvases in which she appears to have aimed for essentialist visions of the multiplicities and connectedness of her country, as imaged in terms of its organic energies. Kngwarreye's vital traceries both conform to, and seem to expand beyond, her clan codes, in abstractions of ceremonial markings and imagery of her country's flora and fauna.
During the early 1990s, Kngwarreye developed a painting technique that literally embodied her sense of the explosive, yet ordered, rhythms of the natural world: she energetically worked her canvas with fluid dots or blobs of colour that formed a pulsing layer over the 'mapped-out' underpinnings of her paintings. Later, she embraced the austerities of stripe compositions in works such as 'Untitled (Awely)', 1994, and in seething, linear 'yam Dreaming' paintings, before she created the remarkable blocky gestural abstractions of 1996, the final year of her life.
Deborah Edwards in 'Tradition today: Indigenous art in Australia', Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 2004
© Art Gallery of New South Wales
- Bibliography (8)
-
Hetti Perkins (Australia) (Author), Art + soul: a journey into the world of Aboriginal art, Carlton, 2010, 144-145 (colour illus.), 281.
Margo Neale (Australia) (Author), Akira Tatehata (Author), Emily Kame Kngwarreye: Utopia: the genius of Emily Kame Kngwarreye, Japan, 2008, 168 (colour illus., detail). cat.no. B-4
Stephen Farthing (Editor), 1001 paintings you must see before you die, London, 2007, (colour illus.).
Hetti Perkins (Australia) (Author), Theresa Willsteed (Editor), Tradition today: Indigenous art in Australia, Domain, 2004, 58 (colour illus.), 59 (colour illus., detail).
'Emily Kame Kngwarreye Alhalkere: Paintings from Utopia', pg. 8-8., The Art Gallery of New South Wales Bulletin May 1998-Jul 1998, May 1998-Jul 1998, 8 (colour illus.).
Margo Neale (Australia) (Author), Roger Benjamin (Australia, b.1957) (Author), Anne Brody (Author), Christopher Hodges (Australia, b.1954) (Author), Philip Morrissey (Author), Judith Ryan (Australia, b.1941) (Author), Greg Weight (Australia, b.1946) (Author), Emily Kame Kngwarreye - Alhalkere - Paintings from Utopia, South Yarra, 1998, 61, 121 (colour illus.). plate no. 77, cat.no. 71
Art Gallery of New South Wales (Australia, estab. 1874), Dead Sun, Domain, 1997.
Art and Australia (Vol. 34, No. 3) Jan 1997-Mar 1997, Jan 1997-Mar 1997, cover (colour illus.), 3 (colour illus.). Both images are seen in detail.
- Exhibition history (7)
-
Dead Sun, Art Gallery of New South Wales, 02 Oct 1997–09 Nov 1997.
Emily Kame Kngwarreye - Alhalkere - Paintings from Utopia, Queensland Art Gallery, 20 Feb 1998–13 Apr 1998.
Emily Kame Kngwarreye - Alhalkere - Paintings from Utopia, National Gallery of Victoria [St Kilda Road], 08 Sep 1998–22 Nov 1998.
Another Country, Art Gallery of New South Wales, 04 Jul 1999–02 Apr 2000.
Emily Kame Kngwarreye, National Art Center, Tokyo, 30 Jan 2008–29 Jul 2008.
Emily Kame Kngwarreye, National Museum of Australia, Canberra, 22 Aug 2008–12 Oct 2008.
Emily Kame Kngwarreye, National Museum of Art, Osaka.
