Awelye-Atnwengerrp, 2006

synthetic polymer paint on canvas

80 x 126 cm

Est. $3,000 – $5,000

Hammer $4,800

Provenance: Pitt St Gallery, Sydney, NSW, Cat No. GHMP269 Private Collection, NSW Accompanied by a certificate of authenticity from Pitt St Gallery
Artwork story: Awelye-Atnwengerrp is the women's ceremony of Atnwengerrp country, its visual language the ochre design painted on the upper body — lines and circles applied to skin before women dance and sing around the fire. Pwerle had carried this knowledge all her life before she ever picked up a brush. When the works she produced at DACOU Gallery (Dreaming Art Centre of Utopia) proved so assured and so immediately understood that gallery owners bought every canvas before she left, she was in her late eighties. On this canvas those lines come forward in columns of white and warm gold moving across a near-black ground, interrupted by loose oval clusters that open and close across the surface. The U-shaped forms are women in ceremony, their bodies painted. The parallel lines are the designs on skin. The whole composition holds the accumulation of a tradition carried into paint by someone who had lived inside it — the ceremony made visible, the country present.

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Sale 3 · Lot 17

c.1920 – 2006

synthetic polymer paint on canvas

80 x 126 cm

Est. $3,000 – $5,000

Hammer $4,800

Provenance: Pitt St Gallery, Sydney, NSW, Cat No. GHMP269 Private Collection, NSW Accompanied by a certificate of authenticity from Pitt St Gallery
Artwork story: Awelye-Atnwengerrp is the women's ceremony of Atnwengerrp country, its visual language the ochre design painted on the upper body — lines and circles applied to skin before women dance and sing around the fire. Pwerle had carried this knowledge all her life before she ever picked up a brush. When the works she produced at DACOU Gallery (Dreaming Art Centre of Utopia) proved so assured and so immediately understood that gallery owners bought every canvas before she left, she was in her late eighties. On this canvas those lines come forward in columns of white and warm gold moving across a near-black ground, interrupted by loose oval clusters that open and close across the surface. The U-shaped forms are women in ceremony, their bodies painted. The parallel lines are the designs on skin. The whole composition holds the accumulation of a tradition carried into paint by someone who had lived inside it — the ceremony made visible, the country present.