Emily Kame Kngwarreye

Stripes , June 1995
synthetic polymer paint on canvas
179.5 x 70.0 cm
bears artist name, title, date and provenance ‘CHAPMAN/JUNE 1995. EMILY KNGWARREYE (R. Gooch Alice Springs NT, CHAPMAN’ (on the reverse) and with Art Gallery of Western Australia label for Inward Loan No, 2000/L233 (on the reverse)

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Provenance
R. Gooch, Alice Springs
Chapman Gallery, Canberra
Ian & Sue Bernadt
The Ian & Sue Bernadt Collection, Mossgreen Auctions, Sydney, 30 August 2010, Lot No. 24
Acquired from the above

‘Kngwarray’s linear works, in their infinitely varied striations and colourations, are elevated beyond formal renderings of repeated motifs by their gestural quality, freed from the two-dimensional plane in their visual effect.’[1]

Emily Kame Kngwarreye departed boldly from her typical style and subjects in the striped or ‘linear’ works that she created in her final years. Quite apart from the fields of overlaid dots for which she was known, Kngwarreye began in 1993 to paint bold lines on white grounds – first as works on paper, and shortly after on canvas. Stunned by Kngwarreye’s newfound economy and the minimalism in these works, James Mollison, Director of the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, at the time, reportedly said: ‘just black lines on white paper, but why are they so good?’[2]

There are many available interpretations for Kngwarreye’s linear paintings. There is a strong resemblance to Awelye body paint designs – and there are photographs from the late-1970s and early-1980s of Kngwarreye being painted and dancing in these women’s ceremonies. Awelye lines in turn read as a form of cartography, mapping the cultural and physical landscape of sandhills and ridges across the desert plains. But the titles of other linear paintings by Kngwarreye allude more directly to amarr or ‘sorry cuts’ – ‘the small parallel scars on women’s upper arms that result from sourcing blood for healing’.[3]

Kngwarreye’s age and health are said to have influenced a more economical style in her final years, yet the vigour and confidence of the linear works affirms their place as a distinct and complete body of work in Kngwarreye’s late oeuvre.

Painted in June 1995, Stripes sits between the early, comparatively austere black and white linear paintings, and the interlocking nets of colour that Kngwarreye painted in 1995 and 1996. It relates strongly to works like Body markings I-IV, 1994, from the Janet Holmes à Court Collection, Perth, with the stripes moving apart and converging freely across the canvas, but maintaining a strong sense of direction and flow.

The National Gallery of Australia also hold a collection of works from this period of her work Untitled (awely), 1994. It was paintings from this period that were selected (posthumously) to represent Australia at the 47th Venice Biennale in 1997 with fellow artists Judy Watson and Yvonne Koolmatrie.

[1] Hetti Perkins and Kelli Cole, ‘lanterna magica: the art of Emily Kam Kngwarray,’ in Emily Kam Kngwarray, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 2023, p. 190. [2] Christopher Hodges, ‘Foreword,’ in Awelye 1994: Emily Kame Kngwarreye, Utopia Art Sydney, 2016, exh. cat., quoted in Perkins and Cole, ‘lanterna magica,’ p. 189. [3] Jennifer Green, ‘The life and legacy of Emily Kam Kngwarray,’ in Emily Kam Kngwarray, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 2023, p. 158.

Photograph by Mick Richards

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Emily Kame Kngwarreye emerged in the 1980s and 1990s as one of Australia's most important contemporary painters. Known affectionately just as “Emily”, Kngwarreye’s work garnered international acclaim in her lifetime and was instrumental in developing interest for Australian Aboriginal art both domestically and overseas. Heralded as a seemingly intuitive artist who came to painting and global attention late in her life, Kngwarreye’s art is better understood as the product of lifelong artmaking in the Anmatyerre traditions of drawing in the earth or painting onto bodies for ceremony.

Throughout her life, Kngwarreye painted her country, Alhalkere, north of Alice Springs, where she was born in around 1910. It was not until she was around 10 years old that she first encountered a white man, around the time that pastoralists annexed Alhalkere and neighbouring lands, naming the area “Utopia”. Kngwarreye was forced to work on these stations, tending for animals, leading camel trains to and from the local mines, and even working as a miner herself. At the same time, she became a ceremonial leader and Elder, continuing her people’s traditions and playing an instrumental role in successfully advocating for the return of Utopia Station in 1979 to Traditional Owners.

In 1977, Kngwarreye was one of 20 founding members of the Utopia Women’s Batik Group. She worked in this medium until 1988, when she transitioned to acrylic paintings. In 1989, Kngwarreye was awarded the inaugural CAAMA Fellowship, which began to move away from the conventional egalitarianism of the Batik Group by allowing Kngwarreye to flourish as an individual artist. In 1992 she was awarded the Australian Artists Creative Fellowship and major works began to enter Australian public collections with sellout shows of her paintings.

After Kngwarreye’s death in 1996, her reputation continued to grow. In 1997 her work was posthumously exhibited at the Venice Biennale. In the same year the Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane presented a major survey exhibition Emily Kame Kngwarreye: Alhalkere: Paintings from Utopia, which travelled to the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne and the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra. A major retrospective of her work was mounted in 2008, by the National Museum of Australia, Canberra, which toured to the National Museum of Art in Osaka and the National Art Centre in Tokyo, Utopia: The Genius of Emily Kame Kngwarreye.