Emily Kame Kngwarreye

Pandanus Aboriginal Art is a gallery that features stunning works from Australia’s most renowned Indigenous artists. With an extensive variety of paintings, sculptures, and genuine artifacts for sale in our Palm Cove gallery and online, we are proud to present a magnificent artwork that truly represents that culture and heritage of the Aboriginal community in Australia.

Kngwarreye was one of the most important and respected contemporary Indigenous artists – if not the most significant – and her works have featured and collected high prices at auction at exhibitions around the world.

Peruse this Kngwarreye artwork in Pandanus Gallery, Palm Cove or online and contact with us if you have enquiries about her work or ordering a piece.

It is astonishing to think that this widely renowned and pivotal figure of the contemporary Indigenous art movement only started seriously painting when she had reached 80 years old. The life and work of Kngwarreye has become something of legend, largely attributing to her mainstream success as an artist. She had exhibitions across the world, including at Sotheby’s, where eight of her works sold for a combined price of $507, 550 and her multiple panelled painting “Creation Story” sold for over $1,000,000. Her style often changed throughout her career (a problem at times, as figures of the art world often requested her to paint in a certain way when she had ‘moved on’ to another era of her truly monumental contribution to the world of Aboriginal art).

Her work covered an extraordinary range of styles of painting and subject matter and ranged in size from the truly monumental to the modest, albeit regarding the latter mostly in panels. She mostly painted in the desert, on the sand usually with a group of women who accompanied and supported her, including their dingos and dogs.

Often, the dogs would follow Emily as she worked the canvas resulting in sandy foot prints becoming an integral part of the artworks’ integrity and inspiration. Her subject matter ranged from desert food and flowers, ceremonial body painting, her personal totemic country of birth and the abstract conceptions of ‘creation’ that informed her ancient belief system – all of which contain levels of quality and inspiration equivalent to the greatest works in modern world art.

Her styles ranged from ‘colourist’ and later began to reflect the work of American abstract impressionists, though she did not necessarily take inspiration from this movement.