GLORIA TAMERRE PETYARRE

Gloria Petyarre has been an extremely prolific painter influenced, no doubt, by her equally prolific aunt Emily Kame Kngwarreye, with whom she lived and worked for many years. Although Gloria remained very much in Emily’s shadow during her aunt’s life, she emerged as an artist of note from 1996 onward. Having watched Emily progress from delicately intimate to more and more gestural works, Gloria’s own paintings became freer naturalistic expressions of landscape as her own career progressed. The women of the Utopia region seem to fall into these distinctly opposite creative camps with very few moving between the two. Paintings are either painstakingly rendered fields of multi-layered coloured dotting with little or no structure, or wildly gestural, unselfconscious and haptic. The latter has suited Gloria’s experimental nature and has seen her able to create large expressive works with a natural ability. Her most popular and successful motif by far has been her Bush Leaf or Bush Medicine Dreamings which work best when the flow in the pattern is most pleasing. These may be executed in relatively small brushstrokes and subtle colourings or bold expressive highly colour charged dabs. Given that Gloria has been so productive it is not surprising that as of 2019, 882 paintings have been offered for sale at auction since 1998 when they first appeared. While these have included many fine large canvases her clearance rate has been just 52%. This low rate is easily attributable to the fact that she still paints vigorously, and so many primary market galleries offer her paintings for sale. Notwithstanding her fine reputation, only seven paintings have sold at auction for more than $20,000, with her highest price being the $78,000 recorded at Lawson Menzies in November 2007 for the large, 164 x 350 cm, work Bush Medicine 2004 (Lot 58). With her average auction result at a low $3,125, it is easy to understand why only a small amount of her very large oeuvre will ever be accepted on the secondary market.

Gloria's 2007 record price of $78,000 more than doubled her previous record, which stood for more than three years. The purchaser of this work paid Sotheby’s $34,575 in 2004 for a five-panel untitled leaf painting measuring 185 x 420 cm at their Melbourne sale in July 2004 (Lot 243). In 2006, Bush Leaves, just over half that size and still ‘fresh’ having been painted just two years earlier, fetched $26,000 at Lawson-Menzies November sale (Lot 219).

With such a low clearance rate and so many average poorly provenanced works available from tourist shops and e-bay, collectors would be well advised to have more in mind than just her name when buying her work. Results for 2007-2008 were a perfect example, with 64 works being offered for sale and just 28 selling for an average price of $7,509. Nothing much has changed since that time. In 2015 a staggering 71 works were offered for sale at recognised reputable public auction houses, of which 68% sold. These figures saw her become the 7th most successful artist that year even though the average price achieved for these works was just $1,588. It was a similar story in 2016, with 82 works offered, of which 46 sold for an average price of $998 and in 2019 when 32 of 65 works sold for an average of $1,614. Even so, she was the 11th most successful artist in 2016 and the 7th in 2019.

While major works of high quality and excellent provenance by Gloria Petyarre will no doubt prove over time to be very good investments, the vast majority of her output will not. Like Emily Kngwarreye before her, who has similar clearance rates at auction, auction houses will be offered far more paintings for each sale than they are able to accommodate. Sotheby's, Christies and Bonham's are likely to avoid them altogether other than those painted for Utopia Art Sydney, which submitted her prize winning works into the Wynne Prize for landscape art at the Art Gallery of New South Wales in 1999 ad 2004. Yet despite these reservations, Gloria Petyarre has clearly earned a deserved reputation as one of the most important female artists of the Eastern Desert and her renown is likely to grow over time as more and more of her best works appear in auction catalogues into the future.