These paintings are part of the Chroma Collection which was donated to the gallery in 2014 by Jim Cobb.

During her short but prolific period as a painter, Emily Kngwarreye made a series of dramatic stylistic shifts, each of which were brilliantly realised.

Although she was involved with ceremonial body painting throughout much of her life and produced batiks in the 1970s as a founding member of the Utopia Women’s Batik Group, Kngwarreye only began painting on canvas in her late seventies and in the last decade of her life she produced around 3000 paintings.

Kngwarreye made few statements about the subject of her paintings but they certainly emerged from an all-encompassing vision of her Country at Alhalkere, and stories related to ‘Awelye’, her Dreaming. Alhalkere is near to Utopia, Northern Territory.

The five paintings in the Chroma Collection are from a stylistic period from the early-to-mid 1990s characterised by fluid, colourful and densely layered sequences of dots.

Three works dating from 1994 are painted in acrylic paint on Belgian linen or canvas and primed with a base layer of charcoal black, over which the fields of dots are layered. It has been suggested that there may be, in these works, an underlying linear pattern or root system beneath the blooming pinks, yellows and greens. This network can be seen more easily in earlier works by Kngwarreye.

The size of the brushmarks suggests that Kngwarreye would often use a single brush to complete an entire painting, using colours which evoke the desert atmosphere and seasonal changes in the land.

Kngwarreye took the singular motif of the dot and produced endless permutations. In some works they cascade in lines, like rain, and in others they swirl and gather in visual currents, each painting conveying a unique expressive power. The layering of the dots gives a three-dimensional depth and complexity which is both systematic and organic.

The gallery is open 10am to 4pm daily and all exhibitions are free.