Angelina Pwerle

Painted for Artlore, Alice Springs, 2003 (catalogue number 11-510)

Niagara Galleries, Melbourne 

Private collection Melbourne, 2004

Private collection, Melbourne, 2012 

Anmatyerr artist Angelina Pwerle (Pull-uh) was much younger than Emily Kame Kngwarreye and the other Utopia women with whom she took up painting on canvas in late 1988, and she did not begin depicting the anwekety (bush plum) Dreaming, for which she is now renowned, until 1996. As such, she eluded the attention of collectors and the media at the height of the Utopia art frenzy in the mid-1990s.

For the past 35 years, her remarkable body of work has remained, by and large, in the hands of the individuals and institutions who acquired pieces when they were first painted. Bush Plum (2003) is a prime example: until now, it has been held privately by the collector who acquired it from Niagara Galleries at the Melbourne Art Fair in 2004. The painting ranks among the most captivating and fully realised works of the artist’s early-00s period, which is characterised by geological patterns and shapes that seem to reference the rock formations and fossils of Anmatyerr Country.

It is one of the first major works that Pwerle painted using just one or two colours (in this case, white and yellow) onto a red ground, and one of the first large-scale works in her oeuvre. Eschewing the ‘scrunch’ technique that she and others sometimes used in the 1990s to speed up the composition of their pointillist paintings,¹ Pwerle applied each dot here individually with a satay stick. The resulting canvas represents a significant outlay of time and effort, yet the energy, excitement and spontaneity of an artist breaking new ground is palpable when Bush Plum (2003) is viewed in situ. 

In the wake of Emily Kame Kngwarreye’s passing in 1996, Niagara Galleries director Bill Nuttall, who had been exhibiting Kngwarreye’s work for several years, spoke to art agent Rodney Gooch about what might come next for the Utopia art movement. Gooch told him that he believed the unsung Pwerle to be an important and natural painter,² just as Kngwarreye had been, and the men soon began working with the artist to mount exhibitions of her work in Melbourne, the first taking place later that year. 

The paintings from those early exhibitions are rare and, in many cases, of an exceptional quality, this fine example being one of the first to appear on the secondary market.

Dan F. Stapleton

Dan F. Stapleton is a Sydney based writer who profiled Angelina Pwerle for the Financial Times in 2002

References:

¹ Anne Marie Brody, Bush Plum Odysseys, in Henry F. Skerritt (ed.), Marking the Infinite: Contemporary Women Artists

from Aboriginal Australia, Prestel, 2016

² Dan F. Stapleton, Sidney Nolan, Emily Kame Kngwarreye, come out of the blue, Australian Financial Review, 22 Feb 2022. https://www.afr.com/life-and-luxury/arts-and-culture/sidney-nolan-emily-kame-kngwarreye-come-out-of-the-blue-20220217-p59xdg