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Emily Kame Kngwarreye
Alhalkere, Utopia Region
Emily Kame Kngwarreye was a senior custodian for Alhalkere country. She began painting quite late in her life and had first been introduced to silk batik with a group of women from Utopia in 1977. Emily had been working with and exhibiting batik in Australia and abroad between 1977 and 1987 before taking up acrylics on canvas.
Canvas gave Emily and the other artists a greater freedom of expression to experiment with different styles in which to portray their Dreaming stories. Because batik had been the first medium that the artists at Utopia had really experimented with, and it being rather a 'one-hit' medium, they developed quite contrasting styles on canvas and Utopian Art now has probably the most diverse range of styles than any other Aboriginal Art region.
Emily's trademark style of superimposed bold gestural dotwork, sometimes overlaying linear patterns derived from Ceremonial body paint designs, would have been technically impossible in batik. In this way, Kngwarreye, as an artist, was able to fully express her country and Dreamings more accurately, as she had been taught.
Earth’s Creation by Emily Kame Kngwarreye:
On Wednesday May 23, 2007, Mbantua Gallery owner Tim Jennings attended a Lawson-Menzies auction in Sydney and made history in the art world by acquiring a work by Emily Kame Kngwarreye. The piece is titled Earth's Creation and sold for $1,056,000, the highest price at that time ever paid for a work of Australian Aboriginal Art and the highest price ever paid for a female artist in this country!
Measuring a stunning 2.7 metres high and 6.3 metres wide in total (consisting of four panels), the painting will be the pièce de résistance of the Mbantua Collection. Like no other single work, Earth’s Creation showcases Emily’s artistic verve, and demonstrates her bold self-assuredness, total lack of self-consciousness and complete certainty when approaching a work on this monumental scale. In its creative spontaneity, ethereal movement, genius of colour complexity, evocative power and stylistic realization, it can be compared in turn to the work of international masters, Pollock, Kandinsky, Matisse, de Kooning and Monet.
Earth’s Creation has been selected for the Emily Kngwarreye Exhibition to be shown in Tokyo and Osaka in Japan during 2008, and then it will finally return to Alice Springs, not far from Emily’s homeland. When it returns it will be placed on permanent public display within Mbantua Gallery and Cultural Museum in Alice Springs.
For additional information or Collection and Exhibition History, please contact us. |
