Emily Kame Kngwarreye, circa 1910-1996, WINTER FLOWERS AT ALALGURA,

synthetic polymer paint on canvas  
bears Delmore Gallery catalogue number 1V68 on the reverse  
213 BY 121.5CM  

Provenance: 
Commissioned by Delmore Gallery in 1991 
Gallery Gabrielle Pizzi, Melbourne 
Sotheby's, The BP Collection of Australian Contemporary Art, Melbourne, September 8, 2002, lot 42 
Private collection, USA  

Exhibited: 
Likely to have been exhibited in, Emily Kame Kngwarreye, Gallery Gabrielle Pizzi, Melbourne, 1992

Cf. For a painting executed around the same time as this work, and on a similar scale and theme, see Untitled (State of My Country), 1991, in the Holt Collection, in Margo  Neale (ed.), Emily Kame Kngwarreye. Paintings from Utopia, Brisbane: Queensland Art Gallery and MacMillan, 1998, pp.96-97, pl. 60, cat. no.42, and in Jennifer Isaacs, et al., Emily Kngwarreye Paintings, Craftsman House, Sydney, 1998, pp.58-59, pl.13, (illus.)
 
This work displays the elements that are characteristic of the development of Kngwarreye's atmospheric paintings. The underlying linear compositional structure is liminally evident within the over-painted fields of dots across the canvas, and lends the painting its visual coherence. The dots themselves are rendered as though the paint was applied using the fingers to animate the picture surface. The result is one of Kngwarreye's supreme images of shifting colour and subtle depths. Terry Smith (Isaacs et al., 1998, p.31) contrasts Kngwarreye's paintings from this period with major canvases by Michael Jagamara Nelson and Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri which are composed of mosaics of dotted patterns indicating vegetation, sand and soil, and the charred earth after bushfires; Kngwarreye's paintings, according to Smith, encode the same elements but they are not ‘a jigsaw of colourfields each tied to a meaning, [they] are more like the air filled with different kinds of locust buzzing in clusters at each other'.