Emily Kngwarreye

Emily Kame Kngwarreye ( 1910 - September 3, 1996 ) was an Australian artist who lived in the Utopia artist colony in the Northern Territory of the Anmatyerre Aboriginal tribe . She was the most successful Aboriginal artist to date on the international art market.

The total value of their work is greater than that of any other Aboriginal artist. Her painting Earth's Creation , made in 1995, achieved a record price for Aboriginal art in 2007 of AUD 1,056,000 (around EUR 733,000). Her main work from the "Final Series", which was first exhibited at Gallery Savah in 1997, achieved a price of 1,100,000 Australian dollars (AUD) in 2008 . Only the Aboriginal Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri was more successful with a sales price of AUD 2.5 million for a single picture.

Beginnings

Born in 1910, Kngwarreye didn't really start painting until she was almost 80 years old. She lived as an Anmatyerre in Alhalkere in the Utopia artist community , about 200 km northeast of Alice Springs . For most of their later life, she and her community were known for making batik . Acrylic painting was introduced to the community around 1988/89 by the Central Australian Aboriginal Media Association (CAAMA). An exhibition of some of the group's pictures, organized by CAAMA, was called "A Summer Project"; Kngwarreye's work immediately drew the attention of critics there. At the same time, there was a worldwide boom in art in general.

While the predominant style in Aboriginal art was based on the style developed in Papunya with Geoffrey Bardon in 1971, which included dots of similar size strung together in a specific pattern, Kngwarreye created her own artistic style. At first, in the period between 1989 and 1991, her pictures had many dots that were sometimes superimposed, in others she mixed different sizes and colors, as in the picture Wild Potato Dreaming from 1990.

These unique, themed images were soon auctioned off for high prizes, with sales exceeding A $ 1 million in fiscal 1989-90.

style

Kngwarreye went through several style changes in her short career as a professional painter. In 1992 their dots began to merge into lines with horizontal and vertical stripes of different colors that represented rivers and terrain. She began to use thicker brushes and the dots grew larger than when she started working.

In 1993 she began to paint patches of color, along with many dots that looked like rings around a free center, as in the picture Alaqura Profusion from 1993, which belongs to this "dump-dump style". She depicted these pictures with a shaving brush and very bright colors. The rings of colors can also be seen in My Mothers Country and Emu Country (1994).

Yams dream time

The following year was marked by a more aesthetic and contemporary style that ended its “colored phase”. Instead, she began to paint simple strips that crossed on the canvas. At first it was thick stripes, which mostly represented the yams , which are indispensable and difficult to find for survival in the desert. For example, Yam Dreaming (1994) and Bush Yam (1995) show the strange growth of yams. As 1995 progressed, her paintings began to resemble those of American abstract expressionists such as Jackson Pollock , with many thinner lines crossing on the canvas. However, she kept the theme of the dream time, for example in Yam Dreaming Awelye (1995) and in black and white Yam-Dreaming. A few weeks before her death, she painted several pictures within three days with a thick brush, including Body Paint (1996).

Yam was one aspect that she particularly emphasized in her work. She painted many pictures with this theme and often began to paint the “trace of the yam”. The plant was particularly significant to them as its middle name "Kame" denotes the plant's yellow flower. In one of the few comments she made about her work, she described how her pictures have a lot to do with the life of the community and the yams: “The whole, that's all, the whole: awelye, arlatyeye, ankerrthe, ntange , dingo, ankerre, intekwe, anthwerle and kame . That's what I paint: the whole thing. "

success

The success and demand for Kngwarreye's paintings also caused her many problems in the community as she tried to maintain her individuality. The myth of the 80-year-old woman who has never been outside the Central Desert and becomes a great painter was one of the reasons for her popularity. In fact, she had been to Perth , Adelaide , Sydney, and Canberra , albeit after becoming famous. Also, there was a lot of pressure on them to paint in a certain way when traders believed that one style was more successful than another.

Eight pictures by Emily Kngwarreye were brought together at the Sotheby’s Winter Auction 2000 and auctioned for 507,550 AUD, with Awelye (1989) bringing in 156,500 AUD.

On May 23, 2007, Earth's Creation fetched A $ 1,056,000 at the German Menzies auction in Sydney, setting a new record in Aboriginal art. Mbantua Gallery was the successful bidder.

With the success came uninvited attention. Many dealers without an understanding of art came into their community and tried to participate in its success. Kngwarreye once told a friend how she escaped five or six truckloads of would-be dealers in Utopia. Her pictures provided an income for the entire Aboriginal community living there. In a society that believes not in individual property but in sharing property with the whole group, she gave up retirement so that she could continue to provide money for her relatives.

According to Tim Klingender of Sotheby's, "the late Emily Kame Kngwarreye [..] was an example of an Aboriginal artist who was incessantly harassed by carpet dealers and who, towards the end of her career, produced a large but inconsistent number of images [..] We'll take roughly one of twenty of her pictures and with these we try to be absolutely sure about the origin. "

Exhibitions

Solo exhibitions:

• Coventry, Sydney, 1990
• Gabrielle Pizzi, Melbourne, 1990, 1991, 1992
• Hogarth Gallery, Sydney, 1991
• Gallery Savah, Sydney, 1994, 1996, 1997.
• Mbantua Gallery and Cultural Museum, 2007-08
• The National Art Center, Tokyo, 2008
• National Museum of Australia, Canberra, 2008

Group Exhibitions: Numerous group exhibitions, including:

• 1990: "Contemporary Aboriginal Art", Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, Harvard Uni., Massachusetts , USA
• 1992: "Aboriginal Paintings from the Desert", touring Russia; "Crossroads, Towards a New Reality, Aboriginal Art from Australia", National Museum of Modern Art, Kyōto and Tokyo in Japan
• 1993: "Aratjara - Australian Aboriginal Art", on tour in Germany, London (Haywood Gallery) and Denmark (Louisiana regional gallery) in the USA
• 1994: National Gallery of Victoria

Prices

Australian Artist's Creative Fellowship, Australia Council, 1992.

See also

• Aboriginal art

literature

• Hart, D. (1995), Emily Kame Kngwarreye: Paintings from 1989-1995 , Parliament House, Canberra
• Isaacs, J. (1998), Emily Kngwarreye Paintings , Craftsman House, Smith, T. North Ryde, Sydney.
• Neale, M. (1998), Emily Kame Kngwarreye: Paintings from Utopia , Macmillan Publishers, South Yarra, Victoria.
• Thomas, D. (1988), Earth's Creation: The Paintings of Emily Kame Kngwarreye , Malakoff Fine Art Press, North Caulfield, Victoria.
• Neale, M. (2008), Utopia: The Genius of Emily Kame Kngwarreye , National Museum of Australia Press, Canberra.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ABC
2. ^ Sydney Morning Herald Painting of 'the lot' breaks record
3. ↑ Arts Hub Australia ( Memento of the original from September 28, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. 
4. ↑ Coslovich, Gabriella (2003) Aboriginal works and artful dodgers , September 2003

Web links

• Emily Kngwarreye at the NGA
• Emily Kngwarreye at the National Museum of Australia