Born: c.1945-2021, Utopia, Northern Territory
Language: Anmatyerre
Known as: Gloria Petyarre, Gloria Pitjara, Gloria Tamerre Petyarre
Dreamings: Leaves, Bush Medicine Leaves, Grass Seeds, Pencil Yam, Awelye (women's ceremony and body paint designs), Arnkerrthe (Mountain or Thorny Devil Lizard) and Aknangkere
Gloria Petyarre was one of the most important artists to come out of Utopia, the Anmatyerre and Alyawarr homelands about 270km north-east of Alice Springs. She was born there around 1945, spoke Anmatyerre, and her Country is Aknangkere.
She was one of the seven Petyarre sisters, alongside Ada Bird, Jean, Kathleen, Myrtle, Nancy and Violet, in a family that has produced some of the most collected work in Aboriginal art. Gloria started out in the Utopia women's batik group in the late 1970s and moved to painting on canvas in 1988, her early work growing out of Awelye, the women's ceremonial body paint.
She is best known for her Bush Medicine Leaves paintings, where the leaves drift and swirl across the canvas as though caught in the wind. In 1999 she won the Wynne Prize for landscape at the Art Gallery of New South Wales for one of these works, the first Aboriginal artist to take out that award. She passed away in June 2021.
DREAMINGS
Bush Medicine Leaves (also called Leaves) — The work Gloria is famous for. The medicine leaves come from a range of native plants gathered across Utopia and prepared different ways, boiled and drunk, made into a poultice or balm, or smoked. Gloria painted them mid-fall, in thousands of small strokes that drift across the canvas as if caught in the wind.
Awelye (women's ceremony and body paint) — The designs women wear across the chest and shoulders for ceremony, and Gloria's earliest subject. The lines swirl and radiate the way the paint sits on the skin.
Arnkerrthe (Mountain or Thorny Devil Lizard) — A small spiny desert lizard and one of Gloria's most important ancestral stories. It travelled across her Country creating the sites and songs, and her swirling design stands for the thorny skin on its back.
Aknangkere — Gloria's own Country. Her later Aknangkere Growth series uses lines of colour running across the canvas to show the plant life regenerating after fire and rain.
Grass Seeds — Native grass seed, a traditional bush food gathered and ground by the women, which Gloria painted in works like Sacred Grass in a strong linear pattern.
Pencil Yam — A bush food with an edible root dug from the ground, one of the bush-food Dreamings shared across the Petyarre family and the wider Utopia group.
AWARDS AND COMMISSIONS
1999 Winner, Wynne Prize for landscape, Art Gallery of New South Wales, the first Aboriginal artist to win it
2004 Highly Commended, Wynne Prize, Art Gallery of New South Wales
Finalist in the Wynne Prize in later years, and in the National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Awards in Darwin
2009 Commissioned by Hermès, the first Australian artist the house had worked with, her Leaves design produced as a silk scarf titled Le Rêve de Gloria
1993 Designed a pair of tapestries woven by the Victorian Tapestry Workshop in Melbourne, now the Australian Tapestry Workshop
1992 to 1993 Created a forty foot mural with her husband Ronnie Price Mpetyane at the entrance to the Australian exhibit at the Kansas City Zoo, which won an American Institute of Architects award in 1994
EXHIBITIONS AND COLLECTIONS
Gloria exhibited across Australia and internationally, and her work is held in major public collections around the world.
SELECTED EXHIBITIONS
1990 to 1991 Utopia: A Picture Story, touring Ireland, London and India as well as Adelaide and Melbourne, with Gloria travelling as a representative of the Utopia women.
1991 Aboriginal Women's Exhibition, Art Gallery of New South Wales, touring
Utopia Body Paint: Art from Australia's Central Desert, touring twelve venues across North America.
Exhibited at the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra.
COLLECTIONS
National Gallery of Australia
Art Gallery of New South Wales (seven works)
National Gallery of Victoria
Art Gallery of South Australia
Queensland Art Gallery
Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory
Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection, University of Virginia
Seattle Art Museum
The Holmes à Court Collection
This painting can be hung vertically or horizontally.
This painting was purchased directly from Gloria, and a gallery certificate of authenticity will be provided with the sale.
