Untitled (Awelye), 1993
Emily Kam kngwarreye
synthetic polymer paint on canvas
121.0 x 91.0 cm
bears inscription verso: artist’s name and Delmore Gallery cat. 93L046
Commissioned by Delmore Gallery, via Alice Springs, Northern Territory in 1993
Private collection
Sotheby's, Melbourne, 24 November 1998, lot 128
Private collection, Melbourne
This painting is accompanied by a certificate of authenticity from Delmore Galleries, Alice Springs.
The genius of Emily Kame Kngwarreye is apparent in the way she created highly evocative paintings of great visual complexity out of deceptively simple marks with the brush. Untitled (Awelye), 1993 is painted in a varied palette of closely matched, high key tones where the overlapping brush marks create an optical density and depth that takes the eye across all parts of the canvas. The effect is to evoke the dizzying summer heat of December in the desert. Yellow, white and pink dots float in and out over a field of red, green and soft purple.
As Janet Holt recalls in the accompanying certificate of authenticity, ‘we observe a close aerial view of country in early transformation…. Birds are quiet, brittle grass and dry twigs snap, and soft growth amazingly rises and spreads over the bare soil’. With emergent growth out of the heat and dryness of summer and with the potential of coming rain, each feathered brush mark suggests the myriad of plants that bloom at this time of year.