Anmatyerre artist Angelina Pwerle began painting her celebrated pointillist interpretations of the anwekety (bush plum) Dreaming in mid-1996, in the weeks following Emily Kame Kngwarreye's death. From the outset, the Bush Plum works were potent, fully formed and emotionally resonant. Many of these early works were laid on a deep and expansive black ground.
In the years that followed, Pwerle worked with an array of colours, many of them bright and vibrant. However the darker works remained a consistent highlight of her oeuvre and from 2010, they once again began to dominate. One of the two Bush Plum works held by The Metropolitan Museum of Art (painted in 2015) is an example of this pared-back spare palette.
Bush Plum was painted by Pwerl on-country at Utopia, where she has lived her entire life. It exudes a palpable energy that belies the meticulous nature of its composition. Pwerle is now about 80 years old and completes only a handful of these intricate canvases each year – yet these recent works are as powerful as any she has produced since she began painting on linen in 1988.
Describing the artist's recent paintings, curator Anne Marie Brody writes: "Pwerle's works are, like the late masterpieces of Mark Rothko or Claude Monet, deep crystallisations at the far frontier of creative endeavour."
