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PWERLE, more than a Gallery. Celebrating Aboriginal culture through 4 generations of family artists. It is entrenchedin the contemporary Aboriginal art industry.

Pwerle Gallery is an Aboriginal, family owned company which was founded in 2015 by Jade Torres. A majority of the artists represented are family members from the Atnwengerrp community, which is located in the Utopia region of the Northern Territory. Jade is the Great Granddaughter to the late Minnie Pwerle and Granddaughter to the late Barbara Weir. Being surrounded by talented family members her whole life, she naturally found her way into the art-world herself. Fast forward to 2022, Jade is proud to represent her cultural heritage with an exciting next generation of contemporary art. Pwerle Gallery is following the footsteps of Jade’s fathers business, DACOU (Dreaming Art Centre of Utopia). DACOU has been recognised as a leading supplier of quality Utopian artwork. Pwerle Gallery; like DACOU, showcases art pieces from four generations of family artists. Together the family have promoted Indigenous art in both traditional and modern forms. Among the 300 national and international exhibitions, their pieces have made their way onto the Sydney Opera House, collaborated with renowned brands like Mercedes Benz and Vogue, but more importantly have adorned the homes of loved clients and collectors. The talented family have proudly broken the record twice, in achieving the highest price paid for a painting by an Australian Aboriginal female artist, Emily Kame Kngwarreye. This achievement is outstanding for both the community and females in business. A percentage of every Pwerle Gallery sale goes directly to the Utopian community. Pwerle Gallery prides itself on representing the Aboriginal culture with complete honesty and integrity, while aiming to strengthen the presence of the culture on the international art stage. When you purchase from Pwerle, you purchase directly from the artist

Representing Aboriginal artists such as:

- Emily Kngwarreye
- Minnie Pwerle
- Barbara Weir
- Jade Akamarre
- Freddy Purla
- Molly Pwerle
- Gayla Pwerle
- Emily Pwerle
- Gloria Petyarre
- Charmaine Pwerle

Amongst many more. Please view our stunning collection at www.pwerle.com.au

27/09/2026

Kudditji Kngwarreye
My Country, 2012
PGKK287 | 144cm x 91cm

Goob painted this during one of the most productive periods of his practice, when his My Country series was at its strongest. Soft pinks move into warm yellows in broad, confident fields of colour, the way the light shifts across Alhalkere through the day and through the seasons.

Where his sister Emily built Country through mark and gesture, Kudditji held it in stillness and scale. There’s no fine dotting here, just colour carrying the land he was custodian of: the open desert sky, the shimmer of spinifex, the ceremonial places tied to his ancestors’ stories.

Stretched and ready to hang, with Pwerle Gallery certification. Available online now!

This is part of a series honouring 30 years since Emily’s passing. OUR COUNTRY is hanging in our gallery now, view the full exhibition online.

UtopiaArt

24/09/2026

Kudditji Kngwarreye
My Country, 2012
PGKK96 | 97cm x 130cm

This is Goob himself, out on Country, holding one of his own My Country paintings, pinks, oranges, yellows and blue moving across the canvas the same way light and season move across the desert.

People have often compared his colour fields to Rothko and the story family like to tell is that he wasn’t aware of Rothko at all. He wasn’t painting toward any art movement or market trend. He was painting Alhalkere, the only way he knew how, and it was the rest of the world that drew that comparison, not him chasing it.

His work has travelled internationally and been sought after by collectors and portrait artists alike, drawn as much to the man as to the paintings. Kudditji had a presence about him, a life etched into his face from decades as a stockman long before he ever picked up a brush and that presence carried straight through into the confidence of his colour fields.

My Country (2012, 97cm x 130cm), pictured here in his own hands, is part of that legacy.

View online now or book an appointment to see it in person at our Adelaide gallery.

Can’t make it in? We also offer FaceTime appointments, where we can walk you through the entire exhibition, piece by piece, from wherever you are.

21/09/2026

Kudditji Kngwarreye
My Country, 2012
PGKK20 | 125cm x 125cm

Blocks of green and yellow move across this canvas like light falling across the desert at different times of day, broad, sweeping fields of colour rather than fine dotting, Kudditji’s own way of mapping Country. The black border left around the edge was one of his signatures, a frame he returned to again and again across the My Country series.

This is as much a record as it is a painting. Family remember him singing the stories of his ancestors as he worked, and what comes through in the finished piece is exactly that: the vastness of the land he belonged to and the care of an elder passing that knowledge down the only way he knew how.

Painted in museum-quality acrylic on premium linen canvas, this piece is about giving Kudditji’s work the space it has always deserved, carrying the same ceremonial Knowledge and lifetime of law as everything else in this exhibition.

View online now or book an appointment to see it in person at our Adelaide gallery.

https://pwerle.com.au/product/kudditji-kngwarreye-pgkk20/

Can’t make it in? We also offer FaceTime appointments, where we can walk you through the entire exhibition, piece by piece, from wherever you are.

20/09/2026

Introducing Kudditji
Kudditji Kngwarreye, pronounced goo-beh-chee and known as Goob. Emily’s skin brother, family through Anmatyerre kinship and every bit as close. Custodian of the Emu Dreaming and the Men’s Business sites tied to his Country at Boundary Bore, Utopia Station, around 230km northeast of Alice Springs. A senior law man, a ceremonial leader and a master artist in his own right, someone whose story has too often been told only in relation to hers.

Before he was known as an artist, Goob lived a traditional bush upbringing, then spent years working as a stockman and a mine worker across Central Australia. As a younger man, he’d take the boys out hunting emu on his Country, teaching that knowledge as part of their initiation into men’s business.

He started painting around 1986 and for years painted the way galleries expected: fine, detailed dot infill in the fashionable style of the time. It wasn’t until 2003 that Goob let that go entirely, picking up a heavily loaded brush and sweeping it broadly across the canvas instead, chasing the actual feeling of his Country rather than a technique built to sell. What came out of that shift became his celebrated My Country series: bold, juxtaposed fields of colour, sometimes harsh, sometimes soft, always instinctive, often compared to Rothko, but unmistakably his own. Family remember him singing while he worked, the same as Emily did, putting the stories of the land, the ancestors and Country straight into the paint as he moved across it.

By 2006 he was named one of Australia’s top 50 most collectible artists and his work now sits in major collections around the world. He kept painting until 2015 and passed in January 2017, but what he left behind hasn’t stopped speaking.

This is exactly why OUR COUNTRY exists: to put brother and sister side by side, two of the strongest voices Utopia ever produced, telling the same Country from two completely different hands.

📸 Image provided by DACOU Gallery.

View the full OUR COUNTRY collection online now, link in bio.

19/09/2026

Emily Kame Kngwarreye
Wildflower Dreaming, 1995
PGEK514 | 82cm x 87cm
POA

Rows and rows of small blooms move down this canvas in warm coppers, dusty natural pink tones and mustard, the colour of Utopia’s country itself before it fades into desert red. It’s a quieter palette than people sometimes expect from a Wildflower piece, but that’s part of what makes it so beautiful.

Look closely and every dot is its own small event: layered, overlapping, catching the light differently depending on where you stand.

Fred Torres, Emily’s great Nephew, who worked alongside Emily for majority of her careeer, once said that of the roughly 3,000 paintings she completed in her lifetime, around 2,000+ of them were Wildflowers. It was the subject she returned to more than any other and this piece is part of that.

Barbara Weir, has spoken about where the technique actually came from. She described watching the way a yam’s roots move underground, pushing up through the earth as the plant grows and how Emily’s dotting echoes that exact movement; the flower isn’t separate from what’s happening beneath it, it’s the same story told above and below the ground.

That’s what’s in this canvas. It isn’t decoration. It’s an entire cycle of growth, season and Country compressed into paint.

Price on application, view online now or book an appointment to see it in person at our Adelaide gallery.

Can’t make it in? We also offer FaceTime appointments, where we can walk you through the entire exhibition, piece by piece, from wherever you are.

This is part of a series honouring 30 years since Emily’s passing. OUR COUNTRY is hanging in our gallery now, view the full exhibition online.

Link in bio.

16/09/2026

Emily Kame Kngwarreye
The rise the world saw and what it looked like from inside the family.

By 1990, Emily was holding solo exhibitions in Sydney. By 1993, she’d represented Australia at the Venice Biennale and won the Australian Artists’ Creative Fellowship. In just three years she took part in 48 exhibitions across Australia and overseas: Russia, Ukraine, Japan, the United States.

Her work is now held in every major Australian state gallery, the National Gallery of Australia, the Vatican Collection, and major museums across Japan and Europe.

From the outside, that looks like a meteoric rise. From inside our family, it looked like watching someone we loved get busier and more tired, travelling further than she’d ever travelled in her life, while somehow never losing the thing that made her work extraordinary in the first place: that it was never about the art world.

It was always about Alhalkere and about telling that story correctly. Everything else was just what happened as a result.

View the full collection of OUR COUNTRY exhibition online now, link in bio.

15/09/2026

Emily Kame Kngwarreye
Wildflower Dreaming, 1994,
PGEK519 | 149cm x 212cm
POA

This piece also comes from our private family collection and has never been exhibited publicly before now.

What makes this one stand apart is the palette. These soft pastel pinks, greens, yellows and blues aren’t a combination you see often across Emily’s body of work and it’s exactly what makes this piece so special.

There’s a real gentleness to it, quieter and more delicate than a lot of her Wildflower pieces, but just as alive.

Emily developed her own way of painting wildflowers, a technique often described as her “dump dump” dotting style: one brush, dipped into multiple colours at once, let loose on the canvas so the pigments blended directly against each other. The dots became both the flowers and the ground beneath them, echoing the way the yam’s roots lift the earth as its flowers emerge above it.

After rain, the desert country of Utopia would burst into exactly this, pinks, greens, purples and yellows against the red sand and blue sky and Emily returned to that transformation again and again throughout her life.

This wasn’t only a visual impression of Country to her. As a senior lore woman, wildflowers meant something practical too: survival, food, growth, the seasonal renewal her people depended on. Every dot in this piece carries that knowledge underneath it.

Price on application, view online now or book an appointment to see it in person at our Adelaide gallery.

Can’t make it in? We also offer FaceTime appointments, where we can walk you through the entire exhibition, piece by piece, from wherever you are.

14/09/2026

Archival photo, Women of Utopia presenting a batik to Clyde Holding, Minister for Aboriginal Affairs.

Left to right: Barbara Weir, Clyde Holding, Kathleen Petyarre, Myrtle Petyarre and Emily Kame Kngwarreye. Utopia, 1981.

From batik to canvas In 1977, Emily joined the Utopia Women’s Batik Group, a community arts project that ran for a decade before she ever touched an acrylic canvas. It was just women gathered together, working with dye and wax, sharing stories while they worked, long before any of it meant international attention.

But batik was never just an art form to the women of Utopia. The money raised through those early sales helped fund the community’s own land claim, the one that saw the Utopia Pastoral Lease formally returned to its traditional Anmatyerre and Alyawarr owners in 1979. It’s easy to look at these early works now as the first chapter of a famous painting career. At the time, they were also part of how this community fought to get its own Country back.

This photograph, from 1981, captures a moment most people have never seen: Barbara Weir, Clyde Holding, then Minister for Aboriginal Affairs, Kathleen Petyarre, Myrtle Petyarre and Emily herself, presenting a batik piece directly to government. By this point the group’s work was starting to be taken seriously at the highest levels, not as craft, but as art with real cultural and political weight behind it.

Family who were there remember Emily doing something different with the same materials everyone else had: the same traditional symbols, the same colours, but somehow always distinctly hers. In 1987, she was introduced to acrylic paint through the CAAMA Summer Project and she took to it immediately. Her first canvas was shown at the S.H. Ervin Gallery in Sydney to instant acclaim.

Ten years earlier she’d been dyeing silk with the other women at Three Bores. Now she was becoming, in the space of a single decade, one of the most significant artists this country would ever produce and our family watched every stage of it happen, up close, not from a press release.

13/09/2026

Emily Kame Kngwarreye
Wildflower Dreaming, 1991
PGEK03448 | 54cm x 90cm
POA

This piece comes from our private family collection and has never been exhibited publicly before now. It’s one of the earliest works in OUR COUNTRY exhibition and one of our personal favourites in the room.

Emily would often ask whoever was around to cut her brushes for her, to get the exact dot she wanted and the results bloomed across the canvas like actual fields of wildflowers. What stops us in front of this one every time is the blue: the way it sits within the piece, placed with such instinct, is genuinely beautiful. It’s such a happy piece to be around.

You can always tell when Emily was working directly with family close by. The ex*****on comes to life differently, there’s an energy in these pieces, Emily sang into her work as she painted and you can feel that when you’re standing in front of them in person, more than any photo can capture.

This piece sits near the very start of her acrylic career, she’d only picked up the medium in 1987 and within a few years had made it entirely her own. You’ll see more Wildflower works across the weeks ahead, Emily returning to the same theme, the same Country, in a slightly different register each time.

The fuller story behind this work is one we share in person, with the painting in front of you. Price on application, view online now or book an appointment to see it in person at our Adelaide gallery.

Can’t make it in? We also offer FaceTime appointments, where we can walk you through the entire exhibition, piece by piece, from wherever you are.

All available online now.

https://pwerle.com.au/product/emily-kame-kngwarreye-pgek520/

07/09/2026

Who she was to us, before the world knew her name:
Before Emily Kame Kngwarreye was a name in international auction houses, exhibition catalogues and gallery retrospectives, she was Aunty Emily.

She was a senior lore woman, a keeper of ceremony and knowledge long before any of this collection existed. In her younger years she also worked as a stock hand on pastoral properties, a role almost never given to Aboriginal women at the time, who were far more often put to domestic work instead.

That independence, that quiet refusal to be placed where she was expected to be, stayed with her for the rest of her life. It’s part of what family remember most clearly about her, long before the paintings.

She was born in 1910 at Alhalkere, the Country she would go on to paint for the rest of her life and she saw a European person for the first time at around nine years old. Her whole world, for decades, was Country, ceremony and family. The art world as we know it now didn’t exist for her yet and wouldn’t for a very long time.

She didn’t pick up a paintbrush until she was already in her seventies. In the eight years that followed, right at the end of a long, already full life, she painted an astonishing 3,000 works, a pace and output that still stuns people who study her career. That number alone tells you something the auction records can’t: painting wasn’t a late-life hobby for her, it was closer to breathing.

Everything the world now celebrates, the exhibitions, the retrospectives, the record-breaking sales, comes out of that same brief, extraordinary window.

Our family knew her for all of it, not just the famous part. We knew her before Alhalkere became a word written on gallery walls. We knew her as the woman who cooked at the same fire we did, who carried
decades of lore and ceremony before a single brushstroke, who was family first, always and an art world phenomenon second.

That’s the story an institution can’t tell you, because they were never in the room for it. Family was.

This is part of a series honouring 30 years since Emily’s passing. OUR COUNTRY is hanging in our gallery now, view the full exhibition online.

Address

By Appointment Only. 59 North Terrace, Hackney
Adelaide, SA
5069

Website

http://www.pwerle.com.au/

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