Emily Kame Kngwarreye

Untitled , 1990
synthetic polymer paint on canvas
152.0 x 122.0 cm
bears artist name and Delmore Gallery no ‘OP 40’ (on the reverse)

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Provenance
Delmore Gallery, via Alice Springs
Ian & Sue Bernadt, Perth
The Ian & Sue Bernadt Collection, Mossgreen Auctions, Sydney, 30 August 2010, Lot No. 20
Acquired from the above


Emily Kngwarreye [1] was first introduced to acrylics in 1988. At this time, well into her seventies, she had worked for over a decade with batik, and before that for decades painting traditionally onto the body as part of Anmatyerr ceremonies.

This painting comes from within the first two years of Kngwarreye’s painting career, at a time when her practice was characterised by complex fields of stippled dots across large canvases.

In the monograph accompanying Kngwarreye’s 2023-24 retrospective at the National Gallery of Australia, curators Hetti Perkins and Kelli Cole wrote about this period of work: 

‘Within these elegant paintings, scaled to encompass the breadth of the subject Kngwarray portrays, distinctive motifs such as the anwerlarr tubers and emu footprints…are submerged or disappear completely in favour of billowing fields of dots that expand or contract across the surface of the canvas. The oscillating pinpoints of colour are sensational, evoking the profusion of seeds…Larger pixelated dotting evokes their blossoms and marks a time of seasonal change when pink, purple, yellow and white flowers carpet the contours of Alhalker Country…In these impressionistic works the expanding toolbox of Kngwarray's art materials also becomes evident in the scale and shape of the stretchers, a polychromatic palette and a range of brushes that were trimmed to achieve the desired painterly effect.’[2] 

The approach to painting adopted by Kngwarreye differed greatly from the practice of male desert painters from this period, whose work was characterised by more precise and ordered dots. Instead, Kngwarreye’s paintings are more gestural and layered, flowing into each other as a reflection of the artist’s country, and the acts of drawing and erasure in the sands of the desert practiced by Anmatyerr women.

As Perkins and Cole again note, with reference to Kngwarreye’s continued progression into increasingly concentrated arrays of dots: ‘The density of the dotting in the works of Kngwarray’s middle painting years is also reminiscent of sand drawing techniques, where the tips of the fingers leave multiple small circular indentations in the sand to represent collections of things such as bush foods.’[3] 

Emily Kame Kngwarreye is one of Australia’s leading painters of the twentieth century. Born around 1910 at Alhalkere, she was an Anmatyerr woman who painted as part of traditional ceremonies for decades before she was introduced to non-traditional materials. When she was in her late-sixties, she was introduced to batik, which she worked with for over a decade until being introduced to acrylic in 1988. What followed from 1989 until her death in 1996 was a period of unparalleled and prolific creativity comprising some 3,000 paintings. 

In 1997, she was chosen (posthumously) along with Yvonne Koolmatrie and Judy Watson to represent Australia at the 47th Venice Biennale. In July 2025, Tate Modern, London, will hold a major retrospective for Kngwarreye in collaboration with the National Gallery of Australia – the first major presentation of her work in Europe. It follows her major 2023-24 retrospective at the National Gallery of Australia, with an accompanying monograph tracing her life and work including reflections from leading scholars and the artist’s family. 

Kngwarreye’s works are held in all major Australian public collections, as well as major international collections including The British Museum, London, UK; the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, USA; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, USA; The Vatican Collection, Vatican City; the Bishop Museum, Honolulu, USA; the Musée du Quai Branly, Paris, France; and The Menil Collection, Houston, USA.

Footnotes
[1] In 2023, the National Gallery of Australia staged a solo retrospective of the artist’s works in which they conducted research and consultations with family and Utopia community members regarding the spelling of Anmatyerr language words. Known affectionately as ‘Emily’, in her lifetime and in the decades following her death, her paintings were exhibited and sold under the name Emily Kame Kngwarreye. The revised spelling of her name is Emily Kam Kngwarray, but the original spelling has been retained here to correspond with the history and documentation of this work.            [2] Hetti Perkins and Kelli Cole, ‘lanterna magica: the art of Emily Kam Kngwarray,’ in Emily Kam Kngwarray, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 2023, p. 189.  [3] Ibid.