Lot 36. BARBARA WEIR (1945-2023)

My Mother's Country

Synthetic Polymer Paint on Canvas
119x180cm
Community/Gallery Code: DG02098
Prov: BMG Art Gallery
Private Collection Adelaide

Frame size: n/a

Condition: Excellent condition, no visible concerns or faults to report, work is on stretched canvas with no additional outside framing.

$4,000-6,000

Exhibited: BMG Art Gallery Artists of Utopia Exhibition February 1999, Cat No. 4

Barbara Weir was an important Anmatyerre and Alyawarr artist whose career developed within the internationally recognised Utopia painting movement of Central Australia. The daughter of celebrated artist Minnie Pwerle, Weir’s artistic practice was profoundly informed by her ancestral heritage and remarkable personal history. Forcibly removed from her family during childhood under government assimilation policies, she later returned to Utopia, re-establishing connections with her mother, extended family and ancestral Country.

Emerging as an artist during the late 1980s, Weir developed a distinctive visual language characterised by intricate linear compositions, rhythmic patterning and sophisticated arrangements of colour. Her paintings frequently explored the ancestral landscapes of Atnwengerrp, her mother’s Country, drawing upon cultural knowledge, personal memory and the traditions of the Utopia community. Her work developed alongside that of significant contemporaries, including Emily Kame Kngwarreye, contributing to the growing national and international recognition of Central Australian Aboriginal painting.

Executed in 1999, My Mother’s Country belongs to an important period in Weir’s artistic development and was exhibited in Utopia at BMG Art, Adelaide, that year. Significantly, the Art Gallery of South Australia acquired another painting from this body of work, My Mother’s Country I, in 1999, providing an important institutional reference for the subject. The accompanying exhibition brochure further documents the present work’s association with this period of Weir’s career.

Weir’s paintings occupy a distinctive position within contemporary Australian Indigenous art, reflecting the relationship between ancestral knowledge, personal experience and the enduring cultural significance of Country.