Untitled - Awelye, c. 1995

66 x 44 cm

Est. $10,000 – $15,000

Hammer $8,000

Provenance: Ngintaka Arts, NT Private Collection, SA Accompanied by four photographs of the artwork in the process of being created
Artwork story: When Emily painted her first works between 1989 and 1990, they featured fine dotting and symbolic underpainting. Thereafter however, they gave way to works in which symbols and tracks were increasingly concealed beneath a sea of dots, until eventually they were no longer evident at all. Employing larger brushes, she created lines of dots that ran across vibrantly coloured, haptic surfaces which, during the years that followed, became progressively visually abstracted, cloud-like and ethereal, as in Lots 68 and 70. By the mid 1990s, Emily was creating wildly colourful canvases by double dipping brushes into pots of layered paint, thereby creating floral impressions with alternately coloured variegated outlines. Despite her age, her physicality was evident as she painted. Often with a brush in each hand she simultaneously pounded them down onto the canvas spreading the bristles and leaving the coagulating paint around the neck of the brush to create depth and form. The runnels of dotted colour across the surfaces of her more abstracted works began to be more formally arranged in parallel lines as exemplified by Lot 67 (NA1-79) in this sale. These gave way to 'line' paintings as early as 1993. She began working in this style more intensely during the last two years of her life. Solid lines of colour, stark and unadorned as in Lot 69, were often painted on multiple panels, and represented the body markings that were created during the ceremonial origins of her artistic practice. Formal compositions comprising these parallel lines eventually gave way to the meandering paths traced by the roots of the pencil yam as they forged their way through the desert sands.

Catalogues64 of 257

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Sale 1 · Lot 67

Emily Kame Kngwarreye

c.1910 – 1996

Region: Eastern Desert
Community: Utopia
Language group: Anmatyerr (Anmatyerre)

Untitled - Awelye, c. 1995

66 x 44 cm

Est. $10,000 – $15,000

Hammer $8,000

Provenance: Ngintaka Arts, NT Private Collection, SA Accompanied by four photographs of the artwork in the process of being created
Artwork story: When Emily painted her first works between 1989 and 1990, they featured fine dotting and symbolic underpainting. Thereafter however, they gave way to works in which symbols and tracks were increasingly concealed beneath a sea of dots, until eventually they were no longer evident at all. Employing larger brushes, she created lines of dots that ran across vibrantly coloured, haptic surfaces which, during the years that followed, became progressively visually abstracted, cloud-like and ethereal, as in Lots 68 and 70. By the mid 1990s, Emily was creating wildly colourful canvases by double dipping brushes into pots of layered paint, thereby creating floral impressions with alternately coloured variegated outlines. Despite her age, her physicality was evident as she painted. Often with a brush in each hand she simultaneously pounded them down onto the canvas spreading the bristles and leaving the coagulating paint around the neck of the brush to create depth and form. The runnels of dotted colour across the surfaces of her more abstracted works began to be more formally arranged in parallel lines as exemplified by Lot 67 (NA1-79) in this sale. These gave way to 'line' paintings as early as 1993. She began working in this style more intensely during the last two years of her life. Solid lines of colour, stark and unadorned as in Lot 69, were often painted on multiple panels, and represented the body markings that were created during the ceremonial origins of her artistic practice. Formal compositions comprising these parallel lines eventually gave way to the meandering paths traced by the roots of the pencil yam as they forged their way through the desert sands.