Earth's Creation

Earth's Creation is a large abstract acrylic painting completed in 1994 by the senior Anmatyerre artist Emily Kame Kngwarreye, one of the most celebrated painters of the Australian Aboriginal art movement, made during the extraordinarily prolific final decade of her life in which she is said to have produced roughly a painting a day. Its sweeping fields of layered colour evoke the seasonal renewal of plant life across Alhalker, her ancestral country in the Northern Territory, rendered through the dense gestural mark-making that became her signature. The painting sold at auction in 2007 for just over one million Australian dollars, a record at the time for an Australian woman artist, and was resold in 2017 for more than double that figure.