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.
• 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
• 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
• 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
• 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, prepared different ways depending on what's needed, boiled and drunk, crushed into a poultice, worked into a balm, or burned and smoked. The leaves change through the seasons, and Gloria painted them mid-fall, thousands of small strokes drifting across the canvas. She first developed the style in 1994 at Mosquito Bore, and her sisters, daughters and nieces have carried it on since.
• Awelye (women’s ceremony and body paint) — The designs women wear across their chest and shoulders for ceremony. This was Gloria's earliest subject, going back to her batik work. The lines swirl and radiate the way the paint sits on the skin, often put on with the fingers.
• Arnkerrthe (Mountain or Thorny Devil Lizard) — A small spiny desert lizard and one of Gloria's most important ancestral stories. Arnkerrthe travelled across her Country creating the sites, songs and stories, carrying a sac of ochre at its neck used for ceremony. Gloria's swirling design, which she called the “swirly ones”, stands for the thorny skin on its back.
• Aknangkere — Gloria's own Country. Late in her career she developed a looser series called Aknangkere Growth, using lines of colour running across the canvas to show plant life regenerating on her homeland.
• Grass Seeds — Native grass seed, a traditional bush food gathered and ground by the women. Gloria painted it in works like Sacred Grass, using a strong linear pattern with light dotting.
• 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.
This painting can be hung vertically or horizontally.
Fine strokes of yellow and orange sweep across a deep black ground like grass moving in the wind. In places the yellow acrylic is laid thinly enough that the black shows through it, softening the marks so that from a distance they blend into a drifting, smokey haze. Up close the strokes are crisp and deliberate. Step back and the whole surface seems to shimmer and move.
Signed by Gloria and supplied with a photo of Gloria alongside the finished work and a gallery Certificate of Authenticity. Purchased directly from the artist.
