Emily Kame Kngwarreye 1910-1996 AWELYE

Commissioned by the Delmore Gallery in 1990
Corporate collection, Sydney
Sotheby's, Aboriginal Art, Sydney, 28-29 July 2003, lot 130
Glenn Schaeffer Collection

The work is housed in a black wooden box frame. The painting is in good condition overall with no signs of repair or restoration with minor scuffing to the edges.
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Cf. For similar paintings from the same period as this painting see Yam Tracking, 1990, in Jennifer Isaacs et al, Emily Kngwarreye Paintings, Sydney: Craftsman House, 1998, p.52, pl.9 and Untitled, 1990, in Margot Neale et al, Emily Kame Kngwarreye: Alhalkere - Paintings from Utopia, Brisbane: Queensland Art Gallery, 1998, p.84, pl.51, illus.

Emily Kame Kngwarreye is one of Australia's most renowned artists, regardless of cultural origins. In 1997 she represented Australia at the Venice Biennale and the Queensland Art Gallery mounted a retrospective exhibition the following year. Another retrospective, Utopia: The Genius of Emily Kngwarreye, was first shown at the National Museum in Osaka, and the National Art Centre in Tokyo before opening at the National Museum of Australia in Canberra in 2008.

Kngwarreye first started painting in the public domain when in her seventies. Her early paintings feature underlying matrices of lines, referring to the pattern of the roots of the yam plant (her major totem) covered by areas of dotting. She often applied the paint directly to the canvas using her fingers. These works attest to a lifetime of painting, especially of body painting in the ritual realm and her participation in the batik making movement at Utopia through the 1980s. Many of the artist's large scale early paintings are now held by the National Gallery of Victoria, the National Gallery of Australia and the Holmes à Court Collection.

This painting is a fine example of the artist's work from this period. It displays the characteristic tracery of the sinuous linear under-painting overlaid with fields of dots. Some of the dotting appears to have been applied to the canvas with her fingers as in the act of painting on participants' bodies in ceremony to further establish the connection between paintings made for sale and painting in rituals as is suggested by the title of the work.