ADA BIRD PETYARRE

With an impressive exhibition history and a strong presence in the literature you would expect Ada Bird to be one of Aboriginal Australia’s most collectable artists, if currently slightly out of fashion. Important institutions that hold her work include the Art Gallery of New South Wales, the National Gallery of Australia, the University of Queensland, the Holmes a Court Collection, the Kelton Foundation in Santa Monica, USA, and the Anthropology Museum, St. Lucia.

The highest price achieved for a work by Ada Bird at auction was the $27,600 paid for the Delmore provenanced Atnangkere (Awelye) 1990 that had been exhibited at the Haywood Gallery, London, the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen in Dusseldorf and Gallery Gabrielle Pizzi, Melbourne. Sold at Sotheby’s in June 1999 (Lot 97) it measured 151 x 122.5 cm, and exceeded its presale estimate of $8,000-12,000 by a significant margin. Another work, currently the artists’ second highest secondary market result, sold for $16,100 against an estimate of $8,000-12,000 at Sotheby’s a year later (Lot128). Women’s Ceremony for the Mountain Desert Lizard 1992 came from Mulga Bore Artists and was signed by Rodney Gooch on the reverse. It measured 230 x 164 cm. Nevertheless, only five of her ten highest results exceed $10,000 and the average price of the 45 works that have sold of the 101 offered is only $3,896. This is due to the fact that many of the pieces that have been offered at public sale were not in her preferred style. She is an artist who has painted without representation. Many of her paintings have been created with poor materials and have not been executed with great care. Her ouvre is a very mixed bag that is heavily weighted with poor works and her failures at auction have been damaged by these since they first appeared in 1995.

Her best year at auction was as early as 1999 when 12 works appeared of which 7 sold for $49,350. In 2007 six of nine sold for $27,192 and in 2010 five of six sold for $20,179. New works entered her current top 10 results in 2010 and 2012 at equal 3rd and 6th places even though her first, second and forth highest results were all recorded in 1999-2000. Interestingly, it was the same work entitled Atnankere Dreaming 1997, which originally sold at Phillips International in 1999 that later achieved the identical result ($15,535) at Mossgreen auctions just over a decade later in 2010.

Her results since 2014 have been less than ideal, with only 5 works selling of the 16 on offer in that period, none of which graced her top 20.

In reality, Ada Bird is one of those artists who was prolific for a decade but created only a small number of highly collectable works overall. While collectors should keep their eyes open for the best of her paintings, on those rare occasion when they appear at sale they are unlikely to set new records over the coming years. Her more inimately executed works are the pieces that will hold, and possibly increase, in value over time. Even so, it is hard to see even the best of them pushing her records a great deal higher than her current best results.