Emily Kam Kngwarray valuation
Anmatyerr painter from Utopia in central Australia whose acrylic canvases of dots, lines and bands trace her Country, Alhalker.
Emily Kam Kngwarray (c.1914–1996) was born at Alhalker, her ancestral Country in the Sandover region of the Northern Territory, about 250 kilometres north-east of Alice Springs, and was a senior Anmatyerr woman of the Utopia community.
What a work by Emily Kam Kngwarray is worth
Send photographs and whatever paperwork came with it. The first question is what the work actually is — edition or unique, when, and in what condition — because everything else follows from the answer. A valuation is free, made online from the photographs you send, and it commits you to nothing. We act for sellers across the United Kingdom, Europe and the United States.
Write to info@whitebankfineart.co.uk, or start below.
Bio
Emily Kam Kngwarray (c.1914–1996) was born at Alhalker, her ancestral Country in the Sandover region of the Northern Territory, about 250 kilometres north-east of Alice Springs, and was a senior Anmatyerr woman of the Utopia community. She learnt batik at Utopia in 1977 and helped form the Utopia Women's Batik Group, working on cotton and silk for about eleven years. In 1988, in her seventies, she painted her first canvas, Emu woman, for A Summer Project, run by the CAAMA Shop with Utopia Art Sydney, and in some eight years made more than 3,000 paintings in acrylic. Her subjects are the plants and animals of Alhalker, among them the emu, the pencil yam (anwerlarr) and its seedpods (kam), after which she is named, and the body designs of awely, women's ceremony. The work moves from fields of dots to dense lines, coloured rings and broad striped bands. Utopia Art Sydney gave her a first solo exhibition in 1990, Untitled (awely) was the centrepiece of the Australian Pavilion at the 1997 Venice Biennale, and the National Gallery of Australia's 2023 exhibition travelled to Tate Modern in 2025.
Besides acrylic paintings on canvas, and later monochrome works on paper, there are batiks on cotton and silk and a small number of etchings and linocuts from the early 1990s. For a painting, a buyer will want to know which art centre or dealer first handled it, with any certificate or documentation, and how it has been stored. Unstretched canvases should be kept flat or loosely rolled, never folded.
At a glance
- Born
- 1914, Northern Territory
- Died
- 3 September 1996, Papunya
Whitebank Fine Art is an art advisory and gallery, not an auction house, and is not affiliated with any auction house or with the artist, their estate or their representatives. This page describes the range we advise on. Nothing here is investment advice.
