Image: D Lan Galleries, Melbourne
D Lan Galleries is offering a 1994 diptych by Emily Kam Kngwarray through its private-sales programme, presenting the two-panel work as an example of the artist’s more restrained approach to colour and composition. Titled ‘Untitled 1994’, the work measures 90 x 120 cm and was painted at Delmore Downs in 1994.
Kngwarray (c.1914–1996) was born at Alhalker on Utopia station in Anmatyerr country in the Central Desert and began painting on canvas in her late seventies, after decades of batik work; the gallery describes a painting career of about eight years.
The Melbourne gallery describes the pair as belonging to Kngwarray’s celebrated “middle period”, a phase marked here by dense indigo grounds, muted orange and intermittent flashes of red. Rather than the saturated palette associated with her ‘green time’ paintings, the diptych is characterised by layered, shadowed surfaces and a sombre tonal range.
D’Lan Davidson, whose comments accompany the private-sale listing, describes the works as “a masterful dialogue,” adding that the panels read as “a single body-paint rhythm passing between them.” The description places emphasis on the relationship between the two panels, which are said to have been painted within four paintings of each other.
The gallery’s accompanying material connects the work’s palette and atmosphere to paintings associated with Kngwarray’s so-called ‘mourning period’. Those works have been linked to the presumed death of a young Kemarre man in 1991. According to the gallery’s account, Kngwarray was deeply affected by the loss, as well as by the circumstances of the man’s disappearance, which disrupted customary mourning procedures that would ordinarily provide closure for the family and community.
Painted three years later, during the cold winter months, ‘Untitled 1994’ is presented as part of a seasonal and emotional continuum in Kngwarray’s practice. The gallery states that winter was a period when the artist’s thoughts often returned to family members who had died. It also cautions against assigning fixed meanings to individual colours, instead describing the paintings as works in which seasons, memory and loss converge within Kngwarray’s evolving painterly language for Country.
The diptych is not announced as part of an exhibition and has no public exhibition dates attached to the listing. It is available through D Lan Galleries’ private-treaty service, which the gallery says operates alongside its annual international exhibition programme and provides direct access to rare works by leading Indigenous Australian artists. D’Lan lists locations in Melbourne/Naarm, Sydney/Gadigal and New York/Lenapehoking, while enquiries for the Kngwarray work are handled through its private-sales department.
The diptych does not have its own page on the gallery’s website; the only Kngwarray painting listed under “Works Available” there is a separate work, Untitled, 1993 (121 × 91 cm, priced at $196,000). No price is published for the 1994 diptych, and enquiries are directed to the private-sales department.
