Sandhills, 2005

synthetic polymer paint on Belgian linen

92 x 92 cm

Est. $5,000 – $7,000

Hammer $4,800

Provenance: Gallerie Australis, Adelaide, SA, Cat No. GAKP0503394
Artwork story: Kathleen Petyarre was born in 1940 at Atnangkere, to the northwest of Utopia Station, and belongs to the Eastern Anmatyerre language group. She began making artworks in 1977, producing batiks with a group of women at Utopia before moving to acrylic on canvas in April 1989, when she asked the Holt family at Delmore Gallery to supply materials. For over two decades she painted exclusively for Delmore Gallery and David Cossey at Gallery Australis, rarely working with other dealers or art centres. She refined a technique of layering very fine dots in thin acrylic paint, building a pristine, even surface of remarkable depth — a practice that drew comparisons to the work of Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko, and earned her the 13th Telstra National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Award in 1996. Sandhills belongs to the body of work in which Petyarre turned from her signature Mountain Devil Lizard Dreaming to paint the country of Atnangkere itself. The earthy red canvas is given over entirely to a deep field of accumulated dots in warm gold, the sandhills present not as image but as atmosphere, country rendered as light absorbed and refracted across a dark ground. In 2001 the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, staged Genius of Place, curated by Russell Storer with Christine Nicholls as curatorial adviser, the first major survey of her practice, bringing together over forty works spanning twenty-five years. The Catalogue notes that subjects such as this belong to the Central Dreaming narrative Arnkerrth (Old Woman Mountain or Thorny Devil Lizard), inherited from her father and grandfather, which allowed Petyarre to image the ever-changing nature of Atnangker Country, from sandstorms and hailstorms to the windswept watercourses, rock holes and sandhills of her Central Australian homeland.

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Sale 3 · Lot 71-a

Kathleen Petyarre

c.1940 – 2018

Region: Eastern Desert
Community: Atnangkere
Language group: Alyawarre (Alyawarr); Anmatyerr (Anmatyerre) – Eastern Anmatyerre

Sandhills, 2005

synthetic polymer paint on Belgian linen

92 x 92 cm

Est. $5,000 – $7,000

Hammer $4,800

Provenance: Gallerie Australis, Adelaide, SA, Cat No. GAKP0503394
Artwork story: Kathleen Petyarre was born in 1940 at Atnangkere, to the northwest of Utopia Station, and belongs to the Eastern Anmatyerre language group. She began making artworks in 1977, producing batiks with a group of women at Utopia before moving to acrylic on canvas in April 1989, when she asked the Holt family at Delmore Gallery to supply materials. For over two decades she painted exclusively for Delmore Gallery and David Cossey at Gallery Australis, rarely working with other dealers or art centres. She refined a technique of layering very fine dots in thin acrylic paint, building a pristine, even surface of remarkable depth — a practice that drew comparisons to the work of Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko, and earned her the 13th Telstra National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Award in 1996. Sandhills belongs to the body of work in which Petyarre turned from her signature Mountain Devil Lizard Dreaming to paint the country of Atnangkere itself. The earthy red canvas is given over entirely to a deep field of accumulated dots in warm gold, the sandhills present not as image but as atmosphere, country rendered as light absorbed and refracted across a dark ground. In 2001 the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, staged Genius of Place, curated by Russell Storer with Christine Nicholls as curatorial adviser, the first major survey of her practice, bringing together over forty works spanning twenty-five years. The Catalogue notes that subjects such as this belong to the Central Dreaming narrative Arnkerrth (Old Woman Mountain or Thorny Devil Lizard), inherited from her father and grandfather, which allowed Petyarre to image the ever-changing nature of Atnangker Country, from sandstorms and hailstorms to the windswept watercourses, rock holes and sandhills of her Central Australian homeland.