An artwork by the late Indigenous artist Emily Kame Kngwarreye, Earth’s Creation 1, has been sold for $2.1m at an auction in Sydney.
Created in 1994 and shown in art galleries around the world, the painting was sold to the Australian art gallery owner Tim Olsen on Thursday night at the Cooee Art Gallery in Paddington.
The sale was meant to go ahead on Tuesday night but was postponed after the server hosting the live auction crashed, either because or a cyber attack or after too many people tried to watch the event.
“It has held the record for any work of art by any Australian female since 2007 when it was sold for $1,056,000 … and now it’s broken its own record by selling for $2m [plus a 5% buyer’s premium],” said the head of the Cooee Art Gallery, Adrian Newstead.
He said it was the second-highest price paid for an Aboriginal artwork after Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri’s Warlugulong, which sold for $2.4m in 2007.
The auctioneer, Tim Goodman, said: “This may be the last time an Indigenous painting of this calibre will appear at auction for a very long time, if ever.”
Kngwarreye was from the Utopia community in the Northern Territory and did not begin painting on canvas until she was in her 80s. Along with the rest of her community, her artwork revolved around mark making through ceremonial activity.