Mountain Devil Lizard Dreaming, 2005

synthetic polymer paint on canvas

150 x 210 cm

Est. $5,000 – $7,000

Hammer $7,000

Provenance: Mbantua Gallery, Cat No. MB28726 Private Collection, NSW
Artwork story: Arnkerrthe, the mountain devil lizard, is a gentle creature covered in thorns, able to camouflage itself by shifting the colour of its skin to match its surroundings. In the Dreaming, it travelled across Gloria Tamerre Petyarre's country creating people, sacred sites, songs and stories — and it became the subject to which she returned across her entire career with greater consistency and formal restlessness than any other, taking the ceremonial body markings of awely, women's sacred business, toward abstraction with a rigour that set her apart from her contemporaries. Here that abstraction is taken to its extreme. Working in black on white across 210 x 150 cm, Petyarre has covered the entire surface with thousands of small arc-shaped marks flowing in overlapping, shifting currents — no focal point, no hierarchy, no rest. The effect is both meditative and unsettling, the surface alive with movement that seems to ripple as you look at it. This is the lizard's camouflage rendered not in colour but in the logic of mark-making itself: a skin that conceals by constant, restless variation. Petyarre was born at Mosquito Bore in the Utopia region in 1938 and came to prominence first as a batik artist in the late 1970s before taking up canvas in the late 1980s. She is one of four celebrated Petyarre sisters.

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Sale 3 · Lot 65

c.1945 – 2021

synthetic polymer paint on canvas

150 x 210 cm

Est. $5,000 – $7,000

Hammer $7,000

Provenance: Mbantua Gallery, Cat No. MB28726 Private Collection, NSW
Artwork story: Arnkerrthe, the mountain devil lizard, is a gentle creature covered in thorns, able to camouflage itself by shifting the colour of its skin to match its surroundings. In the Dreaming, it travelled across Gloria Tamerre Petyarre's country creating people, sacred sites, songs and stories — and it became the subject to which she returned across her entire career with greater consistency and formal restlessness than any other, taking the ceremonial body markings of awely, women's sacred business, toward abstraction with a rigour that set her apart from her contemporaries. Here that abstraction is taken to its extreme. Working in black on white across 210 x 150 cm, Petyarre has covered the entire surface with thousands of small arc-shaped marks flowing in overlapping, shifting currents — no focal point, no hierarchy, no rest. The effect is both meditative and unsettling, the surface alive with movement that seems to ripple as you look at it. This is the lizard's camouflage rendered not in colour but in the logic of mark-making itself: a skin that conceals by constant, restless variation. Petyarre was born at Mosquito Bore in the Utopia region in 1938 and came to prominence first as a batik artist in the late 1970s before taking up canvas in the late 1980s. She is one of four celebrated Petyarre sisters.