Josepha Petrick Kemarre

Josepha Petrick Kemarre (born ca. 1945 or ca. 1953, date uncertain) is an Anmatyerre-speaking Indigenous Australian artist from Central Australia. Since first taking up painting around 1990, her works of contemporary Indigenous Australian art have been acquired by several major collections including Artbank and the National Gallery of Victoria. Her paintings portray bush plum "dreaming" and women’s ceremonies (known as Awelye). One of her paintings sold at a charity auction for A$22,800. Josepha Petrick's works are strongly coloured and formalist in composition and regularly appear at commercial art auctions in Australia. Her art appears to have survived the huge contraction of the primary art market in Australia since 2008. There is no existing Catalogue raisonné of Josepha Petrick's artworks, to date, no fakes have been cited.

Personal background Josepha Petrick Kemarre is an Anmatyerre-speaking Indigenous Australian, born around 1945 or 1953 at the Santa Teresa Mission, near Alice Springs in Australia's Northern Territory.

When Josepha Petrick began painting for Mbantua Gallery in central Australia, she indicated that her name was Josepha rather than Josie, and that this was how she henceforth wished to be known; Their work, which used acrylic paints to create designs representing body painting and ground sculptures, rapidly spread across Indigenous communities of central Australia, particularly after the introduction of a government-sanctioned art program in central Australia in 1983. By the 1980s and '90s, such work was being exhibited internationally. The first artists, including all of the founders of the Papunya Tula artists' company, were men, and there was resistance among the Pintupi men of central Australia to women also painting. However, many of the women wished to participate, and in the 1990s many of them began to paint. In the western desert communities such as Utopia, Kintore, Yuendumu, Balgo, and on the outstations, people were beginning to create art works expressly for exhibition and sale. as part of the contemporary Indigenous art movement that had begun at Papunya in the 1970s. By 1998 her work was being collected by both private and public institutions, such as Charles Sturt University, Petrick's paintings have been included at exhibitions in several private galleries in Melbourne and Hong Kong, as well as at the Australian embassy in Washington in 2001. An image based on a triptych by Petrick, Bush Berries, appears on the cover of a book on the visual perception of motion, Motion Vision.

Central Australian artists frequently paint particular "dreamings", or stories, for which they have responsibility or rights. These stories are used to pass "important knowledge, cultural values and belief systems" from generation to generation. Paintings by Petrick portray two different groups of dreamings, rendered in two distinct styles. These paintings are undertaken with red, blue and orange dots that represent the fruit at different stages in its development. Art consultant Adrian Newstead has ranked her as amongst the country's top 200 Indigenous artists, noting that she has become "known for innovative works that create a sense of visual harmony through fine variegated fields of immaculately applied dotting".