Arnwekety - Bush Plum, 2010

synthetic polymer paint on linen

151 x 91 cm

Est. $5,000 – $7,000

Hammer $5,500

Provenance: Delmore Gallery, NT, Cat No. 10E053 Metro Five Gallery, Melbourne, Vic Private Collection, Vic, acquired from the above
Artwork story: A field of blues, lavenders, and soft rose, shot through with passages of white: Arnwekety – Bush Plum 2010 is among the most atmospherically distinctive works in Ngale's body of work. Where many Utopia painters favour the warm ochres and purples of the ripening fruit, Ngale here works in cooler registers, conjuring the shimmer of Country seen from above, or the light that follows the wet season. Professor Sasha Grishin AM, writing in his essay for Delmore Gallery, described the effect precisely: a dotted underpainting like a spreading veil of colour, over which successive layers are built in pinks, pale greens, light blues, and lavender, the marks optically blending and fusing to create a quality of translucency and inner luminosity, the earlier colour layer leaving faint halo-like echoes beneath. The bush plum ripens between Christmas and May, and Ngale understood it not as subject matter but as custodial knowledge: a plant, a season, and a set of journeys — women moving across Country in search of the fruit — rendered in paint with the precision that ceremony demanded. Grishin described her canvases as simultaneously endless and monotonous in their lateral spread, yet full of meticulously defined detail, a landscape possessing a quality of spacious vastness seen from aerial perspective. Her work is held in the collections of the National Gallery of Vic and the National Gallery of Australia.

Catalogues215 of 257

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Sale 3 · Lot 67

Kathleen Ngale

c.1930 – 2021

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

Arnwekety - Bush Plum, 2010

synthetic polymer paint on linen

151 x 91 cm

Est. $5,000 – $7,000

Hammer $5,500

Provenance: Delmore Gallery, NT, Cat No. 10E053 Metro Five Gallery, Melbourne, Vic Private Collection, Vic, acquired from the above
Artwork story: A field of blues, lavenders, and soft rose, shot through with passages of white: Arnwekety – Bush Plum 2010 is among the most atmospherically distinctive works in Ngale's body of work. Where many Utopia painters favour the warm ochres and purples of the ripening fruit, Ngale here works in cooler registers, conjuring the shimmer of Country seen from above, or the light that follows the wet season. Professor Sasha Grishin AM, writing in his essay for Delmore Gallery, described the effect precisely: a dotted underpainting like a spreading veil of colour, over which successive layers are built in pinks, pale greens, light blues, and lavender, the marks optically blending and fusing to create a quality of translucency and inner luminosity, the earlier colour layer leaving faint halo-like echoes beneath. The bush plum ripens between Christmas and May, and Ngale understood it not as subject matter but as custodial knowledge: a plant, a season, and a set of journeys — women moving across Country in search of the fruit — rendered in paint with the precision that ceremony demanded. Grishin described her canvases as simultaneously endless and monotonous in their lateral spread, yet full of meticulously defined detail, a landscape possessing a quality of spacious vastness seen from aerial perspective. Her work is held in the collections of the National Gallery of Vic and the National Gallery of Australia.