Aboriginal art ‘masterpiece’ a snap at $2m

A famous contemporary painting is now the most expensive artwork by a female Australian artist.

Tim Jennings, the previous owner of Earth’s Creation I with the painting in 2015.

A famous contemporary paintings is now the most expensive artwork by a female Australian artist.

Emily Kame Kngwarreye’s Earth’s Creation I sold for $2 million in an online auction last night that was postponed due to technical failures earlier this week.

Earth’s Creation I sold for $2,100,330, including buyer’s premium and lot offer fee, to Australian collector Tim Olsen.

Mr Olsen recently announced he would open a gallery in New York.

The 6.32m by 2.75m painting, produced two years before Kngwarreye’s death in 1996, led 83 other works at the event, which was a partnership between online art auction start-up Fine Art Bourse and Australia’s oldest Aboriginal fine art business, Cooee­Art. The piece was last sold in 2007 to Tim Jennings for what was a then record $1.056m.

Several bidders sat in Cooee­Art’s Paddington gallery in Sydney, while others placed their bids from all around the world. The starting bid was $1.2m.

“It is a masterpiece, a caco­phony of colour,” Adrian Newstead, CooeeArt’s founder, said, previewing the piece. “It is a grand gestural painting with incredible movement and energy and verve.”

The painting was due to be sold on Tuesday, but a rush of more than 10,000 buyers logging on to Fine Art Bourse’s online platform is believed to have overloaded the system.

“The flood of interest on the site resulted in over 170,000 server processes at once,” Fine Art Bourse IT project manager Carl Welsby said.