''Earth's Creation'' is a 1994 painting by the Australian Aboriginal artist

Emily Kame Kngwarreye Emily Kame Kngwarreye (or Emily Kam Ngwarray) (1910 – 3 September 1996) was an Aboriginal Australian artist from the Utopia community in the Northern Territory. She is one of the most prominent and successful artists in the history of Austr ...

. It was painted in 1994 at

Utopia, Northern Territory Utopia is an Aboriginal Australian homeland area formed in November 1978 by the amalgamation of the former Utopia pastoral lease with a tract of unalienable land to its north. It covers an area of , transected by the Sandover River, and lies ...

, north east of Alice Springs in central Australia.

Artist and painting

Kngwarreye was a senior

Anmatyerre The Anmatyerr, also spelt Anmatyerre, Anmatjera, Anmatjirra, Amatjere and other variations) are an Aboriginal Australian people of the Northern Territory, who speak one of the Upper Arrernte languages. Language Anmatyerr is divided into Easte ...

woman, who only commenced painting when she was aged about 80. In the following eight years, she produced 3,000 or more paintings, an average of one painting per day. ''Earth's Creation'' is described as part of her "high-colourist" phase. It is regarded as one of the artist's masterpieces, representing in her words the "whole lot... everything" – Earth's Creation. The swirling blues, greens and yellows evoke what Kngwarreye called the "green time", after the rains come and the bush erupts with new life in her country, Alhalkere. She painted with a "dump dot" technique, also known as "dump dump", using her brush to pound the acrylic paint onto the canvas and create layers of colour and movement. Due to its large size, the work was painted in four panels. These were stitched together during painting, then subsequently stretched individually. Kngwarreye's paintings are described by leading international art academics as being equal to the works of

Monet Oscar-Claude Monet (, , ; 14 November 1840 – 5 December 1926) was a French painter and founder of impressionist painting who is seen as a key precursor to modernism, especially in his attempts to paint nature as he perceived it. During ...

and great abstract artists such as

Jackson Pollock Paul Jackson Pollock (; January 28, 1912August 11, 1956) was an American painter and a major figure in the abstract expressionist movement. He was widely noticed for his " drip technique" of pouring or splashing liquid household paint onto a hor ...

Willem de Kooning Willem de Kooning (; ; April 24, 1904 – March 19, 1997) was a Dutch-American abstract expressionist artist. He was born in Rotterdam and moved to the United States in 1926, becoming an American citizen in 1962. In 1943, he married painter El ...

, and

Mark Rothko Mark Rothko (), born Markus Yakovlevich Rothkowitz (russian: Ма́ркус Я́ковлевич Ротко́вич, link=no, lv, Markuss Rotkovičs, link=no; name not Anglicized until 1940; September 25, 1903 – February 25, 1970), was a Lat ...

. Experts have argued that ''Earth's Creation'', painted at Utopia on the edge of the Simpson Desert in Central Australia by an Australian with no formal or informal training in art, is an even more important painting for Australia than American painter Jackson Pollock's ''

Blue Poles ''Blue Poles'', also known as ''Number 11, 1952'' is an abstract expressionist painting by American artist Jackson Pollock. It was purchased amid controversy by the National Gallery of Australia in 1973 and today remains one of the gallery's ma ...

'', purchased by the

National Gallery of Australia The National Gallery of Australia (NGA), formerly the Australian National Gallery, is the national art museum of Australia as well as one of the largest art museums in Australia, holding more than 166,000 works of art. Located in Canberra in th ...

in 1973.

Painting history

After being held in a private collection, ''Earth’s Creation'' was purchased by the Mbantua Gallery & Cultural Museum at the Lawson-Menzies auction in Sydney on 23 May 2007 for $1,056,000. At the time, this was the world record price for Aboriginal art and for a work by a female Australian artist. On the request of the

National Museum of Australia The National Museum of Australia, in the national capital Canberra, preserves and interprets Australia's social history, exploring the key issues, people and events that have shaped the nation. It was formally established by the ''National Muse ...

, ''Earth's Creation'' was loaned immediately on purchase to tour in Tokyo and Osaka in Japan in 2007, and to be exhibited at the National Museum in Canberra in 2008. It was exhibited in the Great Hall of Parliament House in Darwin before heading to Alice Springs, where it had never been displayed publicly. In 2015 the work was exhibited in the Giardini Central Pavilion at the 56th

Venice Biennale The Venice Biennale (; it, La Biennale di Venezia) is an international cultural exhibition hosted annually in Venice, Italy by the Biennale Foundation. The biennale has been organised every year since 1895, which makes it the oldest of ...

, "All the World’s Futures", curated by

Okwui Enwezor Okwui Enwezor (23 October 1963 – 15 March 2019) was a Nigerian curator, art critic, writer, poet, and educator, specializing in art history. He lived in New York City and Munich. In 2014, he was ranked 24 in the ''ArtReview'' list of the 100 m ...

. ''Earth's Creation'' was sold at auction in 2017 to New York-based dealer Tim Olsen for a client for $2.1 million, breaking the record it had set in 2015 for the highest sale price achieved by an Australian female artist.

References

External links

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''Earth's Creation'' and NMA
{{Central and Western Desert artists 1994 paintings 1994 in Australia Australian paintings Paintings in Australia Australian Aboriginal art

Artist and painting

Painting history

References

Further reading

External links