DJIRRIRRA WUNUNGMURRA (b. 1968) 

Yukuwa 729-19

(left) 

CAROLINE DATJULUMA GUYULA  (b. 1973)

Milŋiyawuy 7582-21

(centre)

JOCELYN YIMULA MUNUŊGURR (b. 1974)

Djapu 7759-21

 (right)

This montage was created by overlaying two photographic negatives, creating a simple yet enchanting floral composition. A variant of this image is illustrated in two books, both written by Professor Helen Ennis, Olive Cotton, Photographer, NLA, 1995, p63, and in Olive Cotton, AGNSW, 2000 (p. 51).

In 1929, at the age of 18, Olive Cotton became a member of the Sydney Camera Club and the Photographic Society of New South Wales. She graduated from Sydney University with a Bachelor of Arts, majoring in english and mathematics. She joined Max Dupain’s studio shortly after completing her studies, marrying him in 1939. During the war years Cotton ran Dupain’s studio while he was away on war service. Today, she is recognised as a major contributor to Australian photography.

“Dupain’s people photographs of the 1930s and 1940s, taken on Sydney’s most popular beaches, Bondi and Manly, show Australians in the prime of their relationship with their beaches. Money was tight and the beach was free, a relaxing sense of propriety was allowing more freedom in dress and conduct, work hours were accommodating and electronic entertainment hadn’t begun to keep youth indoors. It was an environment rich with possibilities for Dupain, at ease on the beach both as an attractive athlete and a photographer nurturing an inner voice which, he wrote, would spontaneously ‘call out …. and behold, there [the picture] is’.

In a time when the outback dominated intellectual concepts of Australian identity, Dupain was photographing a beach mythology far more real to most Australians than the wide dry spaces of the inland. Few Australians lack light infused memories of a beach and long lost hours spent between cool, turbulent water and warm, quiet sand.”

Jill White, Dupain’s Beaches, Chapter & Verse, 2000, p. 74  

Collection of the artist, Canberra;

Thence by descent;

Deutscher and Hackett, Important Australian and International Fine Art, Sydney, 10/04/2018;

Private collection, Sydney

Rosalie Gascoigne 1985, Fine Arts Gallery, University of Tasmania, Hobart, 8 – 28 September 1985, cat. 3 (illus. in exhibition catalogue)

Rosalie Gascoigne, Pinacotheca, Melbourne, 15 October – 1 November 1986, cat. 1

From the Studio of Rosalie Gascoigne, Drill Hall Gallery, Australia National University, Canberra, 5 September – 8 October 2000, cat. 17

Private collection, Sydney 

Wynne Prize Finalist Award, The Art Gallery of New South Wales, 2001

Ildiko Kovacs’ magnificent painting entitled Escarpment was a finalist in the Wynne Prize in 2001. This fine example of her early work reveals a strong sculptural presence and vibrates with rich energy and passion. Ildiko’s work demonstrates a masterful grasp of paint’s materiality, with a bold and direct application of line and colour. She has a dazzling ability to sculpt line as if it were a three-dimensional form rendered flat. A number of these earlier and pivotal works open a dialogue between western traditions of abstraction and indigenous art.

Works by Ildiko Kovacs are held in National Gallery of Australia; Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney; Art Gallery of New South Wales; Newcastle Regional Art Gallery; Allen Arthur Robinson Collection; Artbank; Bathurst Regional Art Gallery; Campbelltown City Arts Centre; Gold Coast City Art Gallery; Hamilton Art Gallery, Victoria; Macquarie Bank; Maitland Regional Art Gallery; National Gallery of Australia; National Gallery of Victoria; Riddoch Art Institute; World Bank, Washington DC, USA; Visy Corp, Melbourne; Various private collections

Dorothy Bennett, Darwin; The Thomas Vroom Collection; Bonhams Aboriginal Art, The Thomas Vroom Collection, Sydney Sunday 6 September 2015, Lot 144

Private collection, Australia;
Bridget McDonnell Gallery, Melbourne (label attached verso);
Private collection;
Sotheby’s, New York, 31 October 1984, lot 143;
Severn Family Foundation Collection;
Bonhams, Important Australian Art, 24 August 2021, lot 71;
Private collection, Sydney

Collection of the artist;
Private collection, Queensland

A magical feeling for the spirit of place combines with a grand vision of the ocean and adjacent landscape in this large scale, light-filled work. Here the artist, as expressed in his own words, invites the viewer ‘…to live in the vision itself.’ The Robinsons purchased a retreat near Byron Bay in 2005 and the paintings from this area are both rare and among the artist’s finest.

The beautifully detailed foreground foliage in the present picture demonstrates aptly William Robinson’s exceptional skills as a colourist, and in the rendering of the ocean his ability to capture extraordinary effects with clarity of light.

Of his solo exhibition at the Ray Hughes Gallery in 1994, critic John MacDonald stated ’Robinson is the only non-Aboriginal artist since Fred Williams and John Olsen to give… an entirely new view on the Australian landscape’.

William Robinson is represented widely in public collections, including the National Gallery of Australia; Australian university collections; Parliament House, Canberra; many Australian regional galleries; Artbank; Museum of Brisbane and State Library Queensland; all Australian mainland state collections; and internationally in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; The Vatican Museum, Vatican City; the Auckland Art Gallery and Waikato Art Museum, Hamilton in New Zealand.

Sundaram Tagore Gallery, Hong Kong;
Private collection, Sydney

Japanese-born painter Hiroshi Senju is noted worldwide for his sublime waterfall and cliff images, which are often monumental in scale. He combines a minimalist visual language rooted in Abstract Expressionism with ancient painting techniques unique to Japan. Senju is widely recognized as one of the few contemporary masters of the thousand-year-old nihonga style of painting, using pigments made from minerals, ground stone, shell and corals suspended in animal-hide glue. 

Senju’s work is in the collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Brooklyn Museum, New York; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the Asian Art Museum, San Francisco; the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri; the Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto; the Museum of Modern Art, Toyama, Japan; the Yamatane Museum of Art, Tokyo; Tokyo University of the Arts; and the Kushiro Art Museum, Hokkaido. The Hiroshi Senju Museum in Karuizawa, Japan, opened in 2011 as a gallery devoted in its entirety to the artist’s work.

Private collection, Sydney

Short Street Gallery, Broome;
Private collection, New South Wales;
Deutscher and Hackett; Selected Indigenous Art Including Works from the
Collection of Grant Smith, August 31, 2021, lot 1

This painting is accompanied by a certificate of authenticity from Short Street
Gallery, Broome that states:

‘This shows Winpa country, all the jila (waterholes) Winpa left for the people when he died and plenty of mayi (bush tucker).’

Hogarth Galleries, Paddington;

Estate of Bill and Ngaere Geddes, Sydney;

Shapiro Auctioneers, Australian and International Art including Chinese Contemporary Art from the Estate of Ray Hughes, Session I, Sydney, 25 May 2021, lot no. 1;

Private collection, Sydney