Untitled (Awelye) 1994

Emily Kame Kngwarreye made this Untitled (Awelye) painting with what looks like a brush, but who knows? What counts are the marks, these beautiful stripes that remind you of topography maps. The colours are earthy, shifting between reds, browns, and purples. Each stroke feels like a single breath, and these marks are thin, transparent, like veils of colour laid one over the other. If you look closely, you can see the white ground peeking through, giving the piece this sense of light and space, like you could fall into it. Take that middle panel. It’s a bit more purple than the others, which are mostly brown and red, and the stripes are more slanted too. It’s almost like a different mood, a different place. That reminds me of Agnes Martin, but where Martin is cool, calm, and collected, Kngwarreye is raw, intuitive, and so immediate. Both embrace ambiguity, but each gets there from somewhere very different.