Gloria Petyarre
Medicine Leaf, 2008
Acrylic on canvas, 120cm x 90cm
Provenance: Charleston’s Fine Art Auctions, Sydney.
Leaves, c. 2007
Acrylic on linen, 60cm x 45cm
Provenance: Charleston’s Fine Art Auctions, Sydney.
One of the most famous and significant female Australian Aboriginal artists, Gloria Petyarre is acclaimed for her Bush Medicine Leaf paintings. She was the first Aboriginal artist to be awarded a major part prize at the Gallery of New South Wales in 1999, when she was the recipient of the annual Wynne Prize for Landscape. Petyarre is one of the founding members of the historic Utopian Art Movement and has inspired several generations of her family to continue her medicine leaf style paintings (1).
From the authenticity certificate: Gloria paints the traditional women business subjects, which are predominant in Utopia. She uses close tonal values of different colours, creating a dynamic optical intensity. Her work features powerful structural linear patterns derived from body painting, outlined with single dots. At other times the structural pattern becomes submerged in a sea of dots, the tonal relationship causing the structural pattern to dissolve into the base design of her painting. Her main Dreamings that she paints are the Mountain Devil Lizard, Bean, Emu, Pencil Yam, Grass Seed and Small brown Grass as well as the traditional body paint designs worn by women.