This Record-Breaking Aboriginal Artwork Just Sold for $2.1 Million
For the second time, Emily Kame Kngwarreye has fetched the highest price at auction for an Australian female artist.
Despite her painting career lasting just eight years, late Aboriginal artist Emily Kame Kngwarreye smashed another art record this week, as her piece Earth's Creation I again fetched the highest price at auction for an Australian female artist.
The contemporary piece went under the hammer for a huge $2.1 million, breaking its own 2007 record, having sold back then for $1.05 million.
This time, it's been snapped up by art dealer Tim Olsen for his recently opened New York gallery, in an online auction headed up by Sydney's Cooee Art Marketplace and Fine Art Bourse.
The sale of the acclaimed work, which has previously been on show at the likes of the National Museum of Art in Osaka, the National Museum of Australia and the National Gallery of Victoria, is also a big win for Australian Indigenous art, with Fine Art Bourse auctioneer Tim Goodman telling SBS: "this sale will go a long way to breathing life back into the Aboriginal art market." Hope you managed to get a look at it while it was in the country.
Kngwarreye's painting is also not that far off the auction record for an Aboriginal artist, which was set by a Clifford Possum piece that sold for $2.4 million back in 2007. By contrast, the last known painting by Leonardo di Vinci, Salvator Mundi, just sold at auction for around $AUD590 million — making it history's most expensive artwork by far.
Via SBS. Image: Emily Kame Kngwarreye (c.1910–1996) painting Earth's Creation I (1994).
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