The First Aboriginal Art Auction to Be Held In the United States by an International Auction House

HIGHLIGHTS INCLUDE:Emily Kame Kngwarreye’s Monumental Summer CelebrationA Masterpiece by the Most Renowned Female Aboriginal ArtistEstimate $300/400,000

Major Desert Paintings from Leading Collectors in the Field:Thomas Vroom, Gabrielle Pizzi & Fiona Brockhoff

*Public Exhibition Opens Thursday, 5 December*AUCTION 13 DECEMBER

NEW YORK, 27 November 2019 – Sotheby’s is pleased to present the inaugural Aboriginal Art auction in New York on 13 December 2019. The first Aboriginal Art auction to be held outside of Australia or Europe by an international auction house, the sale features modern and contemporary indigenous Australian art dating from the 1950s until the present, including post-colonial and political art created by artists from the world’s oldest continuous culture.

Sotheby’s has conducted standalone Aboriginal Art auctions since 1997, with sales held in Australia from 1997 to 2009, and in London from 2015 to 2018. Led by Tim Klingender, who has overseen all such sales since their inception in 1996, Sotheby’s has remained the continuous market leader in the field of Aboriginal Art for more than 20 years. The series has established numerous new benchmarks and auction records including the highest price achieved for a work of Aboriginal Art at auction (Clifford Possum’s Warlugulong, sold for $2.4 million at Sotheby’s Australia, 24 July 2007), as well as the highest overall Aboriginal Art sale total ($8.2 million, Sotheby’s Australia, 24 July 2007).

Timothy Klingender, Sotheby’s Senior Consultant Australian Art commented: “I am delighted to introduce auctions of Australian indigenous art to the United States, especially since 2019 marks the 30th anniversary of the landmark traveling exhibition ‘Dreamings – The Art of Aboriginal Australia’ at the Asia Society galleries, which first introduced New York City to this dynamic art movement. Along with recent exhibitions of Aboriginal art in New York City at Gagosian and MoMA PS1, our inaugural auction marks a major reappraisal of the field as a growing contemporary art market.”

AUCTION HIGHLIGHTSLeading the auction is Gordon Bennett’s icon of post-colonial postmodernism, Self Portrait (But I Always Wanted to Be One of The Good Guys) from 1990 (estimate $350/450,000). A culmination of a series that Bennett had been working on throughout 1990, the monumental work emphasizes a strong contemporary practice and illustrates Bennett’s self-declared mission to upturn the colonialist assumptions of Australian national culture. The work depicts Bennett as a five-year-old child dressed in cowboy garb ready to draw a toy gun. Eyes-shut, he conjures frontier scenes appropriated from educational Australian social studies books of the late 1950’s, which Bennett renders in two thought-bubbles that take the shape of gridded perspective diagrams that also form a crucifix. To the boy’s left, inside the sharp jagged diagonals of the abutting canvas, erupt the collective fears of a primitivist subliminal colonial imaginary.

This iconic and important painting has been exhibited in major museums in the United Kingdom, Europe, Asia and Australia, and has been illustrated and discussed in dozens of contemporary art publications since its creation. Bennett’s 30-year career saw him achieve significant national and international recognition, with his work featured in biennials in Venice, Sydney, Kwangju, Shanghai, Havana, Prague, Berlin and Yinchuan. 

Also featured in the sale are two early masterworks by Emily Kame Kngwarreye, the most internationally acclaimed female Aboriginal artist whose professional career began at the age of 80. Both on offer from the renowned European Collection of Thomas Vroom, the rare, large-scale works are not only classic examples of Kngwarreye’s abstract dot paintings but reflective of her experimentation with an extended color palette. Created in November 1990, towards the end of the first year of her public career as a painter, Untitled (estimate $250/350,000) moves away from the traditional palette of red, yellow ochre, black and white, introducing greys, purples and browns to create subtle shifts in intensity and emphasize the visual depth of the painting. With its yellow, purple and pink palette, Summer Celebration (estimate $300/400,000) also demonstrates Kngwarreye’s broadening use of color as she moved away from strictly using natural earth tones. One of a series of large canvases painted in the heat of the Australian summer at the very end of 1991, Summer Celebration is among the first which Kngwarreye painted on such a vast scale, emphasizing the broad expanse of her country, and celebrating the seasonal cycle of the ever-flourishing landscape.

A standout lot from the Collection of Fiona Brockhoff is The Seagull (estimate $50/80,000) by Mawalan Marika, a renowned artist as well as a highly influential ceremonial leader and political activist who was leader of the Rirratjingu clan when the first missionaries arrived in 1936. After 57 years, this rare and exceptional bark painting is returning to New York, where it was last exhibited in 1963 at the Qantas Galleries as part of the acclaimed exhibition ‘Australian Aboriginal Art’.

A depiction of the Seagull Mourning Ceremony, the top half of the painting illustrates the Ngurula flying across the country as it travels from one clan’s land to another, linking the communities together. The bottom half of the work shows the mortuary ritual of using a carved seagull’s head with a body and wings made from feathers and string as a ceremonial object to announce a death.

Another highlight on offer in the sale is Tingari Ceremonies at The Site of Pintjun (estimate $120/180,000) by one of Australia’s most prominent abstract painters, Ronnie Tjampitjinpa. Hailing from the Collection of Gabrielle Pizzi, the present lot was recently featured on the cover of the catalogue for curator Kaspar König’s exhibition, ‘Remembering Forward – Australian Aboriginal Painting Since 1960,’ mounted by the Museum Ludwig in Cologne. A classic example of his style, Tingari Ceremonies at The Site of Pintjun features repetitive, geometric shapes and bold lines in the traditional four basic colors of black, red, yellow and white, representing the activities of the Tingari ancestors, and evoking the sacred powers of these supernatural creators, who established Pintupi law and ritual – a common theme throughout Tjampitjinpa’s oeuvre.