Kathleen Petyarre

Kathleen Petyarre (born Kweyetwemp Petyarre; c. 1940 – 24 November 2018, Alice Springs) was an Australian Aboriginal artist. Her art refers directly to her country and her Dreamings. Petyarre's paintings have occasionally been compared to the works of American Abstract Expressionists Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko, and even to those of J. M. W. Turner. She has won several awards and is considered one of the "most collectable artists in Australia". Her works are in great demand at auctions.

Background Kathleen Petyarre was born at Atnangkere, an important water soakage for Aboriginal people on the western boundary of Utopia Station, 240 km (150 miles) north-east of Alice Springs in Australia's Northern Territory. She belonged to the Alyawarre/Eastern Anmatyerre clan and spoke Eastern Anmatyerre, with English as her second language. Petyarre was the niece of the influential Aboriginal artist Emily Kame Kngwarreye and had several sisters who are also well-known artists in their own right, among them Gloria, Violet, Myrtle and Jeanna Petyarre. Kathleen, with her daughter Margaret and her sisters, settled at Iylenty (Mosquito Bore) at Utopia Station, near her birthplace.

Petyarre was introduced to the batik medium at a hippy commune on a visit to Wollongong, New South Wales, and began making her own batik in 1977 with the support and encouragement of the linguist and adult education instructor Jenny Green. Petyarre continued to produce batiks with other women at Utopia until the late 1980s, when, prompted by allergies to the chemicals they were using, she began developing her signature style of painting with acrylic on canvas.

Style Petyarre's technique consisted of layering very fine dots of thin acrylic paint onto the canvas, evoking the Aboriginal custom of ceremonial body painting, to carefully construct abstract landscapes that reveal a remarkable depth when viewed up close. The dots are used to represent, among other things, flowers and spinifex, or animated clouds of sand, hail or even bush seeds. Meanwhile, various shapes and colours are used to depict geographical features such as sand-hills, watercourses and rockholes. Her imagery has been described as "simultaneously macro- and microcosmic".

Most of Petyarre's paintings detail the journeys of her Dreaming Ancestor, Arnkerrth, the Old Woman Mountain Devil, and are indicative of the Aborigines' traditional land navigation skills. She adopted an aerial view typical of her region's artworks to reconstruct memorised landscapes and express her Dreamings as "a barely tangible, shadowy palimpsest, overwritten, as it were, by the surface colours and movement". She described her paintings as "like looking down on my country during the hot time, when the country changes colour... I love to make the painting like it’s moving, travelling, but it’s still our body painting, still our ceremony. 1998 Winner, People's Choice Award, Seppelt Contemporary Art Awards 1998, Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Sydney, NSW, Australia

Exhibitions

Solo exhibitions 2008 Kathleen Petyarre, Metro 5 Gallery, Melbourne, Australia 2004 Old Woman alex award , Coo-ee Aboriginal Art Gallery, Sydney, Australia 2003 Ilyenty – Mosquito Bore, Recent Paintings, Alcaston Gallery, Melbourne, Australia 2001 Genius of Place: The Work of Kathleen Petyarre, Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Sydney, Australia 2000 Landscape, Truth and Beauty – Recent Paintings by Kathleen Petyarre, Alcaston Gallery, Melbourne, Australia 1999 Recent Painting by Kathleen Petyarre, Coo-ee Aboriginal Art Gallery, Mary Place Gallery, Sydney, Australia 1998 Arnkerrthe – My Dreaming, Alcaston House Gallery, Melbourne Australia 1996 Kathleen Petyarre: Storm in Aknangkerre Country, Alcaston House Gallery, Melbourne, Australia

Selected group exhibitions

Major collections

Royal Collection of HM Queen Elizabeth II Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, USA Musée des Confluences, Lyon, France Musée du quai Branly, Paris, France , Utrecht, The Netherlands National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, Australia National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Australia Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, Australia Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory, Darwin, Australia Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission (ATSIC) Collection, Australia Edith Cowan University, Perth Australia Flinders University Art Museum, Adelaide, Australia Royal Palace Museum, Ubud, Bali, Indonesia Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection, University of Virginia, USA Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University, Massachusetts, USA Riddock Regional Art Gallery, Mount Gambier, Australia Essl Collection, Vienna, Austria BHP Billiton Collection, Melbourne, Australia Holmes à Court Collection, Perth, Australia The Kelton Foundation, Los Angeles, California, USA Kerry Stokes Collection, Perth, Australia Levi-Kaplan Collection, Seattle, Washington, USA University of South Australia, Adelaide, Australia Adelaide Festival Centre Trust Collection, Adelaide, Australia Seattle Art Museum, Seattle, Washington, USA (permanent loan) Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth, Australia (permanent loan) Biebuyck Family Collection, Boston, Massachusetts