Now in her mid-eighties, Anmatyerr artist Angelina Pwerle (Ngale) is producing some of the most dynamic work of her career. Her beautifully detailed paintings are predominantly concerned with the representation of Bush Plum Dreaming, a subject of cultural, social and ceremonial importance, celebrating both physical and spiritual nourishment. In her latest work, her highly layered compositions include not only the repeated mark making for which she is well known, but also strokes made with the wooden skewers she has utilised for much of her career. These more gestural works evoke the flow of organic movement; reminiscent of tides, waves, scattered seeds, rain, flowers in bloom, the earth seen from above and distant galaxies. Both meditative and vital, rhythms of movement unfold across the surface of each of Pwerle’s impactful paintings. As Angelina Pwerle’s artistic process is incredibly time consuming, she produces only a few works each year.

Born c.1939 [1], Angelina Pwerle lives and works in Ngkawenyerre, Utopia, Northern Territory. Her paintings are predominantly concerned with the representation of Bush Plum Dreaming, a subject of cultural, social and ceremonial importance, celebrating both physical and spiritual nourishment. Pwerle’s work has featured in exhibitions throughout Australia, as well as in the USA, Canada, China, Korea and Austria, including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York’s touring exhibition entitled The Shape of Time: Art and Ancestors of Oceania (2023-2024); Know My Name: Australian Women Artists 1900 to Now, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra (2021-2022); and Marking the Infinite: Contemporary Women Artists from Aboriginal Australia, which toured the USA and Canada from 2016-2019. Her work is held in a number of significant public and private collections including most national and regional public galleries within Australia, as well as The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, USA; The Collection of Steven Martin and Anne Stringfield, New York, USA; The Collection of Debra and Dennis Scholl, Miami, USA; and the National Museum of Art, Osaka, Japan.

[1] As there are no birth certificates or other records for people of Pwerle’s generation, we cannot confirm her birthdate or her surname/skin name, though she is known as Pwerle, Ngale and Ngal. Curator, writer and academic Anne Marie Brody has noted that paintings by Ngale differ in style to those by Pwerle, and posits that she could be utilising a pseudonym, as have many other artists (Anne Marie Brody, ‘Bush Plum Odysseys’, in Marking the Infinite: Contemporary Women Artists from Aboriginal Australia. From the Debra and Dennis Scholl Collection, DelMonico Books, 2016, pp. 76-90, p. 82).