GLORIA TAMERRE PETYARRE

Gloria Petyarre was an extremely prolific painter, influenced no doubt, by her equally prolific aunt Emily Kame Kngwarreye, with whom she lived and worked for many years. Although Gloria remained very much in Emily’s shadow during her aunt’s lifetime, she emerged as an artist of note from 1996 onward. Having watched Emily progress from delicately intimate to increasingly gestural works, Gloria’s own paintings became freer, naturalistic expressions of landscape as her own career progressed. The women of the Utopia region seem to fall into these distinctly opposite creative camps with very few moving between the two. Paintings are either painstakingly rendered fields of multi- layered coloured dotting with little or no structure, or wildly gestural, unselfconscious and haptic. The latter suited Gloria’s experimental nature and saw her able to create large expressive works with a natural ability that earned her a genuine following.

Her most popular and successful motif by far was her Bush Leaf or Bush Medicine Dreamings which work best when the flow in the pattern is most pleasing. These may be executed in relatively small brushstrokes and subtle colourings or bold expressive highly colour charged dabs. Given that Gloria was so productive, it is not surprising that as of 2025; 1,178 paintings have been offered for sale at auction since 1998 when they first appeared. While these have included many fine, large canvases, her clearance rate has been just 54%. This low rate is easily attributable to the fact that so many primary market galleries and tourist shops still offer her paintings for sale though she died in 2018. Notwithstanding her fine reputation, only ten paintings have sold at auction for more than $20,000, with her highest price being the $78,000 recorded at Lawson Menzies in November 2007 for the large, 164 x 350 cm, work Bush Medicine 2004 (Lot 58). With her average auction result consistently below $2,200 only a small amount of her very large oeuvre will ever be accepted on the secondary market.

With her repeatedly low clearance rate and so many average, poorly provenanced works, collectors would be well advised to have more in mind than just her name when buying her work. In 2015 a staggering 71 works were offered for sale by recognized reputable public auction houses, of which 68% sold. These figures saw her become the 7th most successful artist that year even though the average price achieved for these works was just $1,588. The sheer weight of numbers carried her through. She was11th most successful artist in 2016 and the 7th in 2019.Since 2022, that thread of success has once again become apparent in some notable sales and a gathering uptick in her sales average. Her top ten shifted to include 3 new records and in early March 2025, pieces from the Wolfensohn collection, USA (all early works originally purchased through Utopia Arts) drew attention to Gloria’s more exceptional works. The large and striking Untitled (Awelye Yellow) 1995, took second place in her top ten, selling in Dallas for A$39,000, (size 182.9 x 182.9 cm).

While major works of high quality and excellent provenance by Gloria Petyarre will no doubt prove over time to be very good investments, the vast majority of her output will not. Like Emily Kngwarreye before her, who has similar clearance rates, auction houses will be offered far more paintings for each sale than they are able to accommodate. Sotheby's, Christies and Bonham's are likely to avoid them altogether other than those painted for Utopia Art Sydney, which submitted her prize-winning works into the Wynne Prize for landscape art at the Art Gallery of New South Wales in 1999 and 2004. Yet despite these reservations, Gloria Petyarre has clearly earned a deserved reputation as one of the most important female artists of the Eastern Desert and her renown is likely to grow over time as more and more of her best works appear in auction catalogues into the future.

© Adrian Newstead