MAWALAN MARIKA

Mawalan Marika painted actively for 20 years during a period when Aboriginal art was considered principally as ethnographic. Along with Munggarawuy Yunupingu, Wandjuk Marika and a small band of others, Mawalan was a profoundly influential early artist in North East Arnhem Land due to his commitment to educating those whose actions impacted on Yolngu existence at the time.

His career as an artist parallels that of renowned Western Arnhem Land artist, Yirawala. While only 43 of his paintings have been offered for sale at auction compared to 79 by Yirawala, five have achieved prices above $20,000 and 80% have sold. Foremost amongst these have been his record priced work The Seagull, painted in 1962 and collected by Dr. Stuart Scougall which was exhibited in New York, at the Qantas Gallery in 1963 and, 'The Milky Way', a later work illustrated in Lewis Allan’s Time Before Morning and John Rudder’s 1999 book 'An introduction to Arnhem Land Bark Paintings'. Sotheby’s sold both of these works in 2005 indicating strong recent interest in Mawalan’s best provenanced and most complex works. Prior to this sale the record for a work by this artist had stood since 1999 when Warrana c. 1960 was offered with an estimate of just $15,000-$25,000 but sold for $34,500 to the Kerry Stokes collection.

While high prices have been achieved for those paintings depicting complex narratives, others with simpler, more static imagery achieve much lower prices. This is sharply illustrated by the fact that a wonderfully complex painting Maruma-Story of a Burial c 1960 which sold for as little as $6,900 at Sotheby’s in 1997 achieved a sale price of $18,000 just 4 years later in 2001, while simple works like Djanda (Goanna) c. 1960 and Daymirri (The Whale) c. 1964 sold for as little as $4800 and $4600 respectively, in 2003.

© Adrian Newstead