KATHLEEN PETYARRE

The regular appearance of Kathleen Petyarre’s work at auction attests to her prolific painting career and her enduring audience. Given the fact that she achieved a number of distinctions (including winning the prestigious Telstra Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Award, 1996), one would expect her works to have always been highly collectable. However, controversy regarding her process in 1998 made collectors hesitant. Important paintings created during the mid to late 1990s remained where they were and, despite a doubling of the primary market prices of her works, the secondary market went distinctly cold on this prestigious artist. A re-assessment did not occur until her retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney during 2001.

In the primary market, Kathleen’s prices underwent a series of rapid rises that coincided with her awards, as would be expected of an artist whose career was professionally managed by an exclusive agent with representative galleries in the major capital cities. Paintings from her Mountain Devil Lizard Dreaming series, particularly in the larger format, were readily snapped up by serious collectors. By March 2009, she attained her top price of $96,000 (Lawson and Menzies) and this remains her top record: Mountain Devil Lizard Dreaming 2008, a work with Gallerie Australis provenance (measuring 184 x 245 cm), ticked the boxes on all fronts, being large in scale, with a high degree of beauty and integrity. This sale almost doubled the previous record at auction yet simply aligned her secondary market results more closely to the prices set for her finest work on the primary market. This particular subject still proves to be her most sought after.

2016 was a good year for Kathleen; 22 of the 31 works on offer sold and this 71% sale rate resulted in her being the 5th most successful of all artists that year. Her second highest record was set that year when a lovely Mountain Devil Lizard Dreaming painting, created in 1996 and previously owned by Amina and Franco Belgiorno- Nettis, achieved $73,200 at Bonham’s. As would be expected of an oeuvre in which the same basic structure is repeated many times over, individual works are favored due to subtle differences in their execution and structure, and these remain the prime determinants of value.

Kathleen's My Country images have generally sold for less. The reason lies in two quite different factors. The first is related to the difficulty of illustrating catalogues with any degree of satisfaction, works that are luxuriously painted with fields of tiny dots distinguished by subtle color variations. The second is related to the provenance of her works post-2010, since her agent/representative, David Cossey, retired. Kathleen returned to Alice Springs and prior to her death in 2018, many 'assisted' works of a lesser quality entered the market.

Therefore, provenance is all important with this artist, as well as, to a lesser degree, the period in which the work was painted. For example, of her current top ten sales, seven came from her primary agent Gallerie Australis and two from Delmore Gallery, another very reputable source for works by Utopia artists. While Kathleen lived mostly in Adelaide until 2010 (with her sister Violet and granddaughter Albie Loy), she occasionally painted for Don and Janet Holt at Delmore Downs Station from the time she began painting in the late 1980s. But the works that she painted hastily and under pressure from her extended family, for cash and cars while visiting Alice Springs, have seriously undermined her career. Investors who are not familiar enough with Kathleen’s work to be able to tell the difference between a work of great quality and something knocked out quickly, are advised to carefully examine the back of canvases and note the code numbers to ensure the provenance and original source is worthy of a major investment.

At auction the majority of her works have fallen into the 122 x 122 cm range and the 91 x 91 cm range, principally because these are the sizes that best suit her imagery and which she therefore painted most often. Since her paintings first appeared at auction in 1996, a third have sold between $5,000-10,000, another third between $10,000-25,000, and a tenth in the $25,000-50,000 range, with only two works breaking beyond this upward marker since 2009. The lower price range continues to be her most active area of auction appearances. Since 1996, 472 artworks have been offered at auction and 261 have been sold (55%). Her average price fluctuates from year to year, for example $13,474 average price for 2023 dropped down to $3,828 in 2024. 2025 continues to surprise with 17 selling of 20 works so far on offer, though with only 2 skimming over the $10,000 mark.

By the time she passed away in 2018 her finest works adorned the most important private and public collections in Australia and overseas. These monumental works still enthuse buyers on the middle and lower tiers of the art market, keen to own a Kathleen Petyarre. Meanwhile, her masterpieces will always fetch a premium when they do come up for sale. Those collectors who own them however, have proved to be highly reluctant to let go of these important works that are individually distinctive, and so strongly resonant with the creation of the sandhill country of the artist’s homelands in the Eastern Desert.

© Adrian Newstead