The painting is sold with accompanying Hogarth Galleries’ documentation signed by Helen Hansen on
28/12/1991
Certification issued by Delmore Gallery, Catalogue number 1T16

In Untitled (Summer Transition) the splashes of yellow ochre, viridian, ultramarine and indigo conjure a variegated vision of a lush landscape in Kngwarreye’s country, Alhalkerr, teeming with the
remnant fruits and plants of late summer, well after the rains have ceased as the country enters the
long phase of dry and cold. Set against a ground of deep hues and rusty red and orange ochres,
brush marks appear to weave in and out of the picture plane, floating through space as though
carried by the breeze. That Emily Kame Kngwarreye painted Untitled (Summer Transition) in March
1991 at the beginning of the southern autumn suggests she was painting the landscape that
surrounded her at the time.
If this homage to her country, protecting and nurturing it through the act of painting it reflects a
notion of her identity tied to the land, then the presence of the artist in this landscape is more than
implied. The physicality of Kngwarreye’s hand is captured in the arcs of her reach as she sat
applying dots of colour to the canvas; it forms a sinuous tracery that belies a critical development
the artist’s oeuvre: Untitled (Summer Transition) was painted at a time when Kngwarreye introduced
a ‘streamlining’ to her work (Judith Ryan in Isaacs 1998:80-1) where the ‘graphic underlay’ of
previous paintings ‘was no longer evident’ leading to the fields of colour pictures that reached their
apotheosis in paintings such as Kame, 1991, in the collection of the National Gallery of Victoria
(illustrated in Isaacs 1998, plate 20, pp. 68-9) and Alhalkere (My Country), 1991, formerly in the
collection of the late Ann Lewis AM (see Neale 2008, plate D-22, pp. 136-7).
In his chapter ‘Kngwarreye Woman Abstract Painter’ in Jennifer Isaacs’ 1998 monograph (pp.
33-5), the art historian Terry Smith compares and contrasts Kngwarreye’s paintings with those of
the arch-impressionist Claude Monet, specifically to the Nymphéas (waterlily) paintings that hang in
the Musée de ’Orangerie in Paris. While comparisons of art from disparate cultures and times may
only reveal superficial similarities, Monet offers us play of light on water – what we see are
reflections of sky, clouds and plants, not the thing itself. On the other hand, Kngwarreye’s Untitled
(Summer Transition) plays on the interaction of light, earth and nourishing plant life. Her painting
too may be seen as a reflection although not simply of the elements of nature, but of the ancestral
forces that vivify her country.
Wally Caruana
References:
Isaacs, J., T. Smith, J. Ryan et al., 1998, Emily Kngwarreye Paintings, Sydney: Craftsman House.
Neale, M. et al, 2008, Emily Kame Kngwarreye. Utopia: The genius of Emily Kame Kngwarreye,
Osaka: The National Museum of Art.