Kathleen Petyarre Kathleen Petyarre was born c. 1940, at the remote location of Atnangkere, an important water soakage for Aboriginal people on the western boundary of Utopia, 150 miles north-east of Alice Springs in the Northern Territory of Australia. Kathleen belongs to the Alyawarre / Eastern Anmatyerre clan and speaks Eastern Anmatyerre, with English as her second language. Kathleen, with her daughter Margaret and her sister's, settled at Mosquito Bore, on Utopia near her birthplace. Kathleen now spends part of the year at her residence in Adelaide. Kathleen's mother and seven sisters have managed to hold onto their land near Utopia as a group, establishing a camp at Atneftyeye Boundary Bore. Kathleen Petyarre married her “promised” husband, a much older man. From her late teens to her late twenties, Petyarre lived conform to what it meant to be a “traditional” Anmatyerr wife and mother. Separating from her husband, Petyarre was seeking another dimension to her life. For twenty years she worked as an assistant teacher at the Utopia School. This was the most significant and formative experience of her life, in terms of developing finely tuned intercultural negotiation and mediation skills. It was during this time, in the late 1970s, that Kathleen Petyarre became involved in Utopia batik. The context for his involvement was an astonishing renaissance of Indigenous artistic production. Collectively, the Utopia women began to make a name for themselves as batik artists, the most famous of whom is Kathleen’s late aunt, Emily Kame Kngwarreye. While she was involved in batik, Kathleen Petyarre became involved in a Land Claim of immense significance to the Anmatyerr. She was a key claimant in a claim for Anmatyerr Freehold Title over the Utopia Pastoral Lease. The claim proved successful and in 1980 the land around Utopia was formally returned to its traditional owners. Like many other Indigenous Australians, Kathleen Petyarre has consistently emphasised the strong connection between her land and her art. Each of her batiks and canvases is an assertion of land rights, an expression of her inalienable connection with Atnangker country and its associated Dreaming, Arnkerrth. Petyarre’s restarted acrylics on canvas in 1986. She resigned from her teaching post at Utopia School to devote herself to painting full time. Her career as a fulltime artist is now acclaimed as an internationally important painter. In 1996 she was the winner of the 13th Telstra National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Award. In Kathleen’s art, Arnkerrth is not represented figuratively, but conceptualized spatially. In common with many other contemporary artists, Petyarre evinces a high level of discipline with regard to her work. It sometimes gives the impression that the earth has been sliced open, so that we feel that we are looking at the earth’s surface dissected, from above. Petyarre’s restrained palette, mostly restricted to “earth” colours, compounds this impression. Underneath the screen of very fine dotting Kathleen’s Dreaming exists as a barely tangible, shadowy palimpsest, overlaid by the luminous surface colours which gradually change tone. Nodes of colour shift seamlessly through the work. As a result, Petyarre’s works provide the viewer with a fleeting, subliminal, awareness or suggestion of her Dreaming Ancestor’s travels or journeying. A common theme of Kathleen's paintings refer to Arnkerrthe, Mountain or Thorny Devil Lizard, (Moloch horridus) a small lizard which has spikes on its back and lives in the desert, crossing vast terrain and changing colour according to its environment like a true chameleon. The enormity of his journeys can be felt in the landscape of Kathleen's works. This important clan country serves not only as a creation site, but a sacred place in which to reconnect with the Dreaming through ceremony, and in particular, initiation rites. Kathleen continues to demonstrate her detailed, accurate knowledge and respect of country through her remarkable paintings that in turn give the viewer an insight into an ancient other world of endless beauty. This ability to operate on a number of levels simultaneously has led to contemporary art critics unselfconsciously discussing Petyarre’s work in relation to Kant’s concept of the sublime, or to compare it with New York based Ross Bleckner’s hypnotic conceptual studies of the molecular world of DNA and cell structure. Her considerable reputation as one of the most original Aboriginal artists has since been confirmed nationally and internationally by her regular inclusion in exhibitions at the most reputed museums and galleries. A book about her art, ''Genius of Place'' , was published in 2001 in conjunction with a solo exhibition of her works at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney, and her paintings can be found in public and private collections all over the world. Her work has been selected, along with just a handful of Aboriginal artists, for inclusion in the permanent collection of the new Musée du quai Branly in Paris. Kathleen Petyarre is one of the most sought-after living Aboriginal artists. She has been repeatedly nominated by the influential journal Australian Art Collector as being among “the 50 most collectable artists in Australia” . She has several sisters who are also well-known artists, among them: Ada Bird Petyarre, Gloria Petyarre, Nancy Kunoth Petyarre, Violet Petyarre, Myrtle Petyarre, Jeannie Petyarre. However it is Kathleen's works that consistently show the highest degree of innovation and are in the greatest demand, and they tend to fetch the highest prices at auctions. Awards: 1996 - Joint Second Prize, Open Award Category - The 3rd National Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander Heritage Commission Art Award, Canberra, Australia. - Overall Winner of the Telstra 13th National Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander Art Award, Darwin, Australia. 1997 - Overall Winner of the Visy Board Art Prize, the Barossa Vintage Festival Art Show, Nurioopta, Australia. 1998 - Finalist, % 1998 Seppelts Contemporary Art Award - Visual Art Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, Australia. - Winner, People's Choice Award, 1998 Seppelts Contemporary Art Award, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, Australia. Artist-in-Residence 1997 - Art Gallery of South Australia, Desert Artists-in-Residence, Adelaide, Australia, January - Museum Puri Lukisan, Ubud, Bali, Indonesia, June Solo Exhibitions 1982 Sydney Craft Expo, Sydney, Australia, presented by Ilkeston Gallery, Melbourne, Australia 1991 Royal Hibernian Academy, Dublin, Ireland 1995 Ludwig Forum für Internationale Kunst, Aachen, Germany 1996 "Kathleen Petyarre - Storm in Aknangkerre Country" Alcaston House Gallery, Melbourne, Australia Australian Contemporary Art Fair 5, Melbourne, presented by Alcaston Gallery, Melbourne, Australia 1998 Australian Contemporary Art Fair 6. Melbourne, Australia “Arnkerrthe - My Dreaming”, Alcaston Gallery, Melbourne, Australia. 1999 Recent Paintings by Kathleen Petyarre, Coo-ee Gallery, Mary Place, Sydney, Australia. Art Chicago 2000, Navy Pier, Chicago, USA. SF3 San Francisco International Art Exposition 3. Fort Mason Centre, San Francisco, USA. 2000 “Landscape: Truth and Beauty”, Alcaston Gallery, Kathleen Petyarre, Retrospective Exhibition, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney. New Directions in Contemporary Aboriginal Painting, Songlines Gallery, San Francisco, USA Australian Contemporary Art Fair 7. 2001 Genius of Place. The work of Kathleen Petyarre. Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, Australia. SF4 San Francisco International Art Exposition 3, Fort Mason Centre, San Francisco, USA. Across, An exhibition of Indigenous Art & Culture, Flinders University City Gallery, Adelaide, Australia 2002 Gallerie Commines, Paris, France Australian National Tour Exhibition, Autralia Arco 2002, International Contemporary Art Fair, Madrid, Spain. Australian Contemporary Art Fair 8, Melbourne. 2003 “Ilyenty – Mosquito Bore”, Alcaston Gallery, Melbourne, Australia Miami Contemporary Art Fair 2003, Miami, USA. Arco 2003, International Contemporary Art Fai, Madrid, Spain, 2006 Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, New Hampshire, USA National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington DC, USA Prism - Contemporary Australian Art at the Bridgestone Museum of Art, Tokyo, Japan 2007 Galerie Rigassi, Bern, Switzerland Gallery Anthony Curtis, Boston, USA Group Exhibitions 1980 Utopia Batik, Mona Byrne’s Artworks Gallery, Diorama Village, Alice Springs, Australia “Floating Forests of Silk: Utopia Batik from the Desert”, Adelaide Festival Centre, Adelaide, Australia 1989 “Utopia Women’s Paintings: The First Works on Canvas”, A Summer Project, S.H. Ervin Gallery, Sydney, Australia. Utopia Women’s Paintings: The First Works on Canvas, A Summer Project, Orange Regional Gallery, Orange, Australia. Utopia Women, Coventry Gallery, Paddington, Sydney, Australia. “Utopia - A Picture Story”, 88 Silk Batiks from the Robert Holmes a Court Collection, Tandanya Aboriginal Cultural lnstitute, Adelaide, Australia. 1990 CAMMA/Utopia Artists in Residence Project, The Perth Institute of Contemporary Art, Perth, Australia Utopia - A Picture Story. 88 Silk Batiks from the Robert Holmes a Court Collection The Royal Hibernian Academy, Dublin, Ireland. The Crawford Municipal Art Gallery, Cork, Ireland, Limerick City, Gallery of Art, Ireland. Contemporary Aboriginal Art from The Robert Holmes a Court Collection, Carpenter Centre for the Visual Arts Harvard University, Boston, USA. Contemporary Aboriginal Art from The Robert Homles a Court