Aboriginal art Aussie blog

Australian Aboriginal art appreciation is increasing at a mind-boggling rate this year. So far in 2007, the indication is that the Australian Aboriginal art market will certainly continue and most probably far outstrip the last decade’s average yearly value increase of 40 to 50 percent. In a blog less than four months ago, I wrote that on the 9^th of July, 2001, an Aboriginal art work titled All That Big Rain Coming Down Top Side by Rover Thomas sold at a Melbourne Sotheby’s auction for $778,750. On the 1^st of May this year, this held the current world record for an indigenous Australian work of art.

http://www.australiagift.net/australia/products.asp?cat=12

[Link to browse in Australian Dollars]

Warning. This article may contain the names and images of Aboriginal and Islander people now deceased. It also contains links to sites that may use images of Aboriginal and Islander people now deceased.

However, on Wednesday the 23^rd of May, Mbantua Gallery owner Tim Jennings set a new record at a Lawson-Menzies auction in Sydney when he paid Au$1,056,000 (US$910,345) for Earth's Creation by the late artist, Emily Kame Kngwarreye. It was previously owned by a superannuation fund in Adelaide, South Australia that commissioned the work in 1995, a year before the artist’s death. This painting is an epic work depicting multiple dreamings or myths of the Dreamtime of creation.

The sale of Earth’s Creation has proven to be merely a prelude to an even greater watershed event in this booming art market. On Tuesday the 24^th of July, the National Gallery of Australia purchased Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri’s 1977 painting titled Warlugulong for Au$2.4 million at a Sotheby's auction in Melbourne. None of this artist’s works had ever sold for over Au$400,000 before.  The gallery director, Ron Radford, says that the huge canvas "is to dot painting what Blue Poles is to American art".

The previous owner, Hank Ebes, is a Dutch-born Melbourne art dealer who recently retired. He paid Au$36,000 for the painting at an auction 11 years ago. For most of the time between 1996 and when the artist originally sold the painting for Au$1200 in 1977, the canvas had been hanging in the cafeteria of the Commonwealth Bank staff training centre in Melbourne. To the ex-art dealer’s credit, he says that he felt at the time that he had scored the "bargain of the century". He has said that the work is as significant to Aboriginal art as Rembrandt's The Night Watch is to Dutch art.

The appreciation of Australian Aboriginal art has come a long way at a rapid pace since 1980 when the Art Gallery of South Australia became the first museum in the world to purchase and display a Western Desert dot painting. It seems as if it has spiralled 360 degrees when one considers that that painting was also a work by Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri. Ron Radford, who was a curator at that state gallery back in 1980, is quite open about attitudes to the first public displays of Aboriginal art. He observed that the art establishment of commentators and directors "regarded it as tourist art". The works were described by one prominent museum director as "an abstract tourist hoax”. Collectors can be tourists (or souvenir hunters), so it follows that souvenir hunters are collectors. History has certainly documented the fact that the traditional Aboriginal people of Australia were both hunters and collectors. Maybe deep down in our collective human psyche, regardless of how sophisticated we may be, there resides a souvenir hunter and collector.

Original Aboriginal art paintings are available online for souvenir hunters and collectors from Australia Gift Shop at www.australiagift.net [ link to shop in Australian Dollars ] . The precise Webpage where these artworks are displayed and for sale is the Paintings on Canvas page [ link to displays in Australian Dollars ]. Each work also includes some brief details about the indigenous artist, who, in the case of these artworks, is Sue Terare of Bundaberg in the state of Queensland in Australia. Sue is a half-descendant of the Goreng tribe from the local region.