Emily Kame Kngwarreye

Earth's Creation - 'the million $$ painting'!
Now on exhibit at Mbantua Gallery, Alice Springs

Renowned artist -

Emily Kame Kngwarreye

Earth’s Creation is described as part of her “high-colourist” phase. It’s a rich vibrant masterpiece of electric blues, greens and yellows, from what Emily called the “green time”, after the rains came and the bush erupted in new life. She was profoundly influenced by the colours of the land and worked its magnificence into her paintings of this phase. Greens crept into her paintings when the dust would be washed off the leaves and new grasses grew; yellows and purples when alpeyt (wildflowers) bloomed. Earth’s Creation which has been dubbed Australia’s most important painting, is instilled with Emily’s exuberant celebration of her country, Alhalkere, and embraces the full width of her life, country and Dreamings.

What Emily painted cannot be better described than in her own words; her definitive and most extensive comment given almost regardless of the artwork in question:

“Whole lot, that’s the whole lot - awelye [my dreaming], atnwelarre [pencil yam], arnkerrthe [mountain devil lizard], ntange [grass seed], tinge [dreamtime pup], ankerre [emu], intekwe [favourite food of emus, a small plant], and kame [yam seed]. That’s what I paint, whole lot.”

Tim with Aboriginal artist and Utopia elder,

Lindsay Bird.

As with most indigenous artists Emily returned to one theme, this theme, over and over. The ‘whole lot’ belonged to her country Alhalkere in which her connection with was extremely profound. Set on the Western reaches of the Utopia region, Alhalkere held the essence of her aboriginal ancestors and the source of her creative power, making her life and art inseparable.

It was the appearance of her intuitive and impulsive mark-making that first prompted a speculation that she painted on a different level; in a higher state of mind where body and mind acted as one. An unwitting consequence of her life in the desert and her immersion in its Dreamings presented her with an intelligible and deeply rooted knowledge of her subject that allowed her to paint it and know that she painted it true without giving the finished canvas a second glance back. She is said to have painted to the beat of the land.

Emily’s work as an artist began decades before she became a painter where she served a long life of body painting and sand drawing. From 1977 to 1988 she worked with batiks when workshops were brought out to Utopia. In circa 1987, Emily first began painting in acrylics and one of her earliest known paintings is thought to be ‘Women Collecting Bush Yams’ which is on display in our Museum. In 1992 Emily was the first aboriginal artist to receive an Australian Artists Creative Fellowship and in 1994 she painted Earth’s Creation, one of her most acclaimed artworks. In 1997, one year after her death, Emily’s reputation grew threw an appearance at the Venice Biennale, a major retrospective of her work which drew international acclaim. Earth’s Creation set a world record price at auction in 2007 gaining worldwide media coverage and in 2008 the National Museum of Australia launched it’s Utopia: the Genius of Emily Kame Kngwarreye touring exhibition in Japan establishing Emily’s name alongside the grand masters of Modern art.

To learn more about Emily, view her artist profile.

• Cultural Museum
• Bush Tucker Display
• Weapons Display
• Exhibition Room - Earth's Creation
• Landscape Paintings
• Gabriella Wallace Wall
• Education
  • Utopia
  • Dreamtime
• Tours
• Mbantua Gallery Field Trip Documentary

Previous Exhibitions

Emily Kame Kngwarreye: 1916-1996 online.
This exhibition, comprised of artwork from Mbantua Gallery’s Permanent Collection, was created for people to learn many new things about Emily, one of Australia’s most respected artists.

July 27th 2006—March 2007 : Leaves of Time

A Retrospect of Gloria Petyarre’s work on canvas.

This exhibition showcased a collection of works by Utopia artist Gloria Petyarre, showing an evolution in her paintings.

October 30th 2004—July 24th 2006 : Evolution of Utopia
Evolution of Utopia was our first Museum exhibition when the Mbantua Cultural Museum opened on October 30th 2004. This exhibition showcased 144 works by 71 Utopian artists between 1986 and 2004.

Gallery & Museum

"For serious collectors and people who enjoy indigenous art, this painting is a reason to spend a day in Alice Springs." -

Damien Ryan, Mayor of Alice Springs

Tim Jennings, owner of Mbantua Gallery, first met Emily in 1985 when she was part of a women’s group working in batiks, a few years before she began painting in acrylics. He was close to Emily and members of her extended family right up until her death in 1996 and recalls her being a strong minded woman even though she spoke very little English and he very little of her languages.

Mbantua Gallery has represented the work of many Utopia artists since its establishment in Alice Springs.  Mbantua includes a commercial gallery for the sale of fine aboriginal art, and is one of Australia’s largest privately owned museums of desert art, where Earth’s Creation will be on permanent display to the public.

Painting History

"This work is a national treasure, and as such we honoured government requests to allow it to be the centrepiece of several major international exhibitions before we even had a chance to display it ourselves." - Tim Jennings

After being held in a private collection, Earth’s Creation was purchased by Mbantua Gallery at Lawson Menzies auction in Sydney on May 23, 2007 for $1,056,000. At the time, this was the world record price for Aboriginal art and that of any Australian female artist.

On the request of the National Museum of Australia (NMA), Earth’s Creation was loaned immediately on purchase to tour in Japan in 2007 for the Utopia: the Genius of Emily Kame Kngwarreye touring exhibition. This landmark exhibition was the brain child of Akira Tatehata, the director of the National Museum of Art in Osaka, who ‘is so passionate about Emily’s work that he couldn’t rest until he brought it to Japan’. The Japanese claim that the exhibition was ‘...the most successful contemporary art blockbuster ever seen in Japan, breaking Andy Warhol’s 10 year record by 40,000 visitors’. Not being known to Japanese, it was a risk that Akira took to exhibit Emily’s work, particularly as it followed in the footsteps of a Monet exhibition which had a million visitors in one month, and was co-billed with Modigliani. Yet Japan’s arts establishment decided Kngwarreye’s work deserved to be put on the same stage as these major artists. The exhibition saw over $130,000 visitors (more than double the Museum expected) with a surprise visit by the Crown Prince, the Empress and an official opening by Princess Takamado Hidenka. Japanese critics heralded Emily as a great modern artist and possibly the greatest modernist of all. Earth’s Creation’s stunning vista of colours and enormity greeted visitors on the first level, giving them a powerful taste of ‘Emily’s Genius’.

"Boyd, Whiteley and Nolan all had exhibitions overseas, but nothing like this. This would easily be the largest international exhibition for an Australian artist." -

Margo Neale

The exhibition finished at the National Museum in Canberra in 2008. Earth’s Creation was then exhibited for two months in the Great Hall of Parliament House in Darwin before heading home to Alice Springs, where it has never before been shown. 

International Issues

"Emily’s work has been regularly compared to the New York abstract expressionists Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning and Mark Rothko. A principal distinction the critics make, and it is key to understanding the acclaim surrounding the paintings of the Utopian artist, is that Kngwarreye is better, more profound." - Sydney Morning Herald, 31/5/08

Emily Kame Kngwarreye’s paintings are described by leading international art academics as being equal to the works of Monet, and other great Impressionist and Abstract artists such as Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, and Rothko.

Experts have argued that Earth’s Creation is a more important painting for Australia than Jackson’s Blue Poles, the highly controversial American work that put the National Gallery of Australia onto the world stage in 1973, and remains one of its most celebrated works today.

Earth’s Creation was painted by a genius Australian, with no formal or even informal training in art. She knew nothing of any other schools of art - she’d never even seen another painting. She had barely 20 or so words in English. She spoke in ancient Australian languages, Anmatyerre and Alyawarr. She painted “everything” in a way that was never done before, and has never been seen since.

“What’s important is that she never would have visited anything like New York, she was a product of a very, very remote community. So there are similarities in style, but her source was entirely different - her work was rooted deeply in her culture and deep in Australia’s desert.” -

Margo Neale