Gloria Tamerre Petyarre


Born: c. 1945
Community: Utopia, NT
Language: Anmatyerre
Gloria first gained international artistic recognition as a member of the acclaimed Utopia Batik Project in the late 1970s and 1980s. She started to paint in 1988 and traveled with the exhibition “Utopia: A Picture Story” to Ireland, England and India in 1990. Her first solo exhibition was at the Australian Galleries in New York in 1991. In 1999 she became the first contemporary Aboriginal artist to win the coveted “Wynne Landscape Prize” of the Art Gallery of New South Wales (Sydney).

Gloria’s main Dreamings are bush medicine, mountain devil lizard and awelye, the ceremonial body paint of women’s ceremonies.
She continually develops her painting style to a higher level of abstraction while experimenting with color schemes and different brush strokes.

Gloria comes from a large family of painters. Her sisters Ada, Kathleen, Violet, Myrtle, Nancy and Jeanna are also renowned artists.

Her works are well represented in international public and private collections, notably the National Gallery of Australia (Canberra), the Holmes a Court Collection (Perth) and the Levi Kaplan Collection (Seattle, USA).

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