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Email PageEmily Kame Kngwarreye: Paintings
October 9, 2007- November 10, 2007
Reception: October 11, 6:00 pm - 8:00 pm
Emily Kame Kngwarreye
Robert Steele Gallery
511 W 25th StThe Robert Steele Gallery at 511 West 25th Street between 10th and 11th Avenues in Chelsea is pleased to announce the opening of Emily Kame Kngwarreye, opening on Tuesday, October 9th through November 10th, 2007. A reception will be held Thursday, October 11th from 6 to 8pm. Also on view in the Gallery’s Project Room will be new paintings and works on paper by Anne Raymond. Gallery hours are Tuesday through Saturday from 11 to 6pm and by appointment.
She’s been called the “Desert Monet,” compared to Matisse and Renoir; a painter of “mythic proportions” and, in her lifetime “a one-woman industry.” From the time Emily Kame Kngwarreye painted her first canvas for ‘A Summer Project 1988-89: Utopia Women’s Painting’ at the Ervin Gallery in Sydney, her work received widespread acclaim and was quickly recognized as groundbreaking and original, traversing the lines between traditional Aboriginal art and pure abstraction.
She was born around 1910 in Alhalkere, or Utopia Station and in a time when most Aboriginal women were employed as domestics worked as a ranch stock hand, an early display of the strength and independence that would be the hallmarks of her painting. A village Elder and senior member of the Utopia Womens’ Batik Project of 1978 that toured in exhibitions in Australia and abroad, Emily painted from 1988 until her death in 1996.
In that brief period her artistic output was phenomenal – thousands of paintings with a stylistic range and force that thrust her – and as a result, contemporary Australian Aboriginal art - into the international art arena. She remains the most lauded painter of the Utopia art movement and one of the best-known desert artists; she painted with an undiminished energy that belied her years: “no one could stop her” it was said, and she was still at it two weeks before her death.
Although she said that discussion about her work was “other people’s business,” dismissing such inquiries, Emily did admit once: "Whole lot, that's the whole lot. Awelye (my Dreamings, or women’s’ ceremonies performed to care for ‘country’), arlatyeye (pencil yam), arkerrthe (mountain devil lizard), ntange (grass seed), Tingu (a Dreamtime pup), ankerre (emu), intekwe (a favorite food of emus; a small plant), atnwerle (green bean), and kame (yam seed). That's what I paint; the whole lot."
Emily Kame Kngwarreye was awarded the Australian Artists Creative Fellowship in 1992, and by the mid 1990's large collections of her paintings were acquired for permanent display in public galleries, and retrospective exhibitions were mounted at the Art Galleries of Queensland, New South Wales, and Victoria. Her paintings have been showcased in many exhibitions world wide including the Venice Biennale, and two major exhibitions are scheduled for 2008 in Japan: at the National Museum of Art in Osaka, and the National Art Centre in Tokyo.
Finally, it was an epic painting by Emily Kame Kngwarreye entitled Earth's Creation that smashed all previous records for indigenous art when it sold for $1,056,000 (AUS) at an auction in Sydney in May of 2007.
As the only gallery in New York with an extensive major collection of Emily’s work, and as one of only a few in the US dealing with contemporary Australian Aboriginal art in any substantial way, the Robert Steele Gallery is especially proud to present Emily Kame Kngwarreye.
Books and DVDs related to artists in this show
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