LOT 85
EMILY KAME KNGWARREYE
Australian, 1910 – 1996
Untitled
Comes with Dacou Gallery Label on the verso
Synthetic polymer paint on canvas
45.5 x 35.5 cm
Provenance Private Collection, Singapore
RM 12,000 – RM 20,000
Working in a remote, north-west corner of the Simpson Desert, on land annexed by pastoral leases during the 1920s, Emily Kam Ngwarray became, in the final decade of her life, perhaps the most celebrated and sought after Australian artist of her time. A leading figure in Eastern Anmatyerr ceremony, Ngwarray was also an artist whose work many white Australians first felt the force of an Indigenous art that could be seen to negotiate a space both within the aesthetics of Western abstraction and the timeless precepts of Aboriginal cultural traditions. During the early 1990s, Ngwarray developed a painting technique that literally embodied her sense of the explosive, yet ordered, rhythms of the natural world; she energetically worked her canvas with fluid dots or blobs of colour that formed a pulsing layer over the ‘mapped-out’ underpinnings of her paintings, evident in this work. Later, she embraced the austerities of stripe composition, before she created the remarkable blocky gestural abstractions of 1996, the final year of her life.