Welcome to this special Cooee Art MarketPlace Indigenous Fine Art offering for 2020. The sale will include 62 works from the collection of one of Aboriginal art’s greatest promoters and supporters, the incomparable owner of the former Aboriginal Gallery of Deamings, Hank Ebes. The estimated value of the 107 artworks collected for this auction is $1,800,000 – 2,500,000. Hank Ebes crashed into the burgeoning Indigenous art scene in Melbourne in the early 1990s. A former crop duster and commercial pilot, he started collecting Aboriginal art after flying his own plane to Alice Springs and buying 120 paintings on the spot from Don Holt at Delmore Downs, before falling out with the cattle station owner come art dealer. He went on to specialise in art from the Eastern Desert, employing at one time, three ‘field officers’ before providing Fred Torres at Dacou Gallery with the financial backing to hold workshops ‘on country’ with Torres’ mother Barbara Weir, grandmother Minnie Pwerle, and auntie Emily Kngwarreye. During one such workshop Emily painted her masterpiece Earth’s Creation I, which Cooee Art MarketPlace sold in 2017 for $2.1 million, the highest price ever achieved for the work of any Australian female artist. During the inaugural conference in Alice Springs that established the powerful Aboriginal Art Association of Australia (then Art Trade) in 1997, Ebes bought 80 paintings from a delighted Daphne Williams at Papunya Tula, fuelling a feeding frenzy amongst dealers who spent more than $250,000 within the hour. The Ebes collection is vast. No less than 650 paintings by Emily Kngwarreye passed through his hands. They include works in every style during her 7-year painting career, including more than half of her amazing final series artworks painted in the last weeks of her life. He has hundreds more by Minnie Pwerle, including the first 300 works Minnie ever painted. This sale includes works by Emily Kngwarreye and other Utopia artists, as well as 40 paintings depicting different sites and aspects of the Tingari Dreaming with examples by the Pintupi Nine, the last remnant group to abandon their nomadic lives in the Western Desert in 1984. An essay about Hank Ebes’ 30-year involvement in Aboriginal art is printed on pages 16 and 17 of this catalogue. Our cover lot is a highly desirable and rare Final Series work by Emily Kame Kngwarreye - only the second of the 24 works she created during the last weeks of her life to have ever been offered for public sale. Carrying a pre-sale estimate of $400,000-600,000, it is, in my own opinion, one of the crown jewels of Aboriginal art. Scattered throughout this catalogue are testimonials to Emily’s genius from some of the most highly respected curators in Australia. They attest to the power, beauty, and importance of this and other final series paintings. Other works worthy of note in this sale are the panoramic Emily’s Country (Lot 51), created with a thickly textured profusion of purple, yellow, pink and blue paint. This major 212 x 148 cm work, depicting the desert's food sources after rain with a laser-like intensity, is estimated at $260,000-320,000; two strong paintings by Tommy Yanima Watson, including the major work Irika (Lot 83) measuring 301 x 182 cm and conservatively estimated at $80,000-120,000; a charming image of the Three Wise Men visiting Jesus at Warmun by Queenie Nakarra McKenzie (Lot 64), which is in the sale at $25,000-35,000; and two early paintings created by Rover Thomas on construction ply soon after the dawn of the Kimberley painting movement. These works by Rover Thomas were both exhibited at museums throughout Europe and Japan between 1996 and 2006, as part of the Nangara exhibition, and are illustrated in the impressive bound catalogues that accompanied this important exhibition. We look forward to hearing from you or seeing you in person in the lead up to the auction. The quality of the artworks on offer is exceptional. You can discover a wealth of information on all of the major artists whose works are included in this catalogue, as well as detailed information about the content and subjects of the artworks