Emily: Desert Painter of Australia

Emily Kame Kngwarreye, “Untitled – Alhalkere,” 1994 © ADAGP, Paris, 2022. Photo: Rob McKeever.

Whole lot, that’s the whole lot. Aweleye (my Dreaming), 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: whole lot.
—Emily Kame Kngwarreye

Gagosian is pleased to present Emily: Desert Painter of Australia, the first solo exhibition in France of the work of Emily Kame Kngwarreye (1910–1996). This is the fourth in a series of noted exhibitions at Gagosian on the remarkable phenomenon of remote Australian Indigenous painting, organized in collaboration with D’Lan Contemporary, a leading gallery in Indigenous Australian art, based in Melbourne, Australia.

One of Australia’s most revered artists, Emily, as she is widely known, grew up in the remote central desert region of Utopia, where she had only sporadic contact with the world beyond her own community. While working as a stockhand, she developed her prodigious artistic skills in Utopia settlement workshops—first in traditional batik production and then painting on canvas. (Until Emily’s intervention in 1988, paint and canvas had predominantly been the purview of male artists since the introduction of these materials into the Papunya settlement in the Northern Territory in the early 1970s).

Inspired by the topographies of land and sky, the cycles of season, flooding waters and rains, seeds, harvest, and spiritual forces, her paintings depict the enduring narratives and symbols of her people and their land, and the keeping of precious shared knowledge and stories. The name “Kame” denotes the pencil yam and its seeds, Emily’s totem and thus the motivating force of her oeuvre.

SOURCE: Gagosian.