Reasons to buy from Pwerle

Pwerle Gallery is a 100% Aboriginal, family-owned art gallery representing family members from the Atnwengerrp community. We pride ourselves on representing this culture with complete honesty and integrity. When you purchase from Pwerle, you are purchasing directly from the artist’s own family, not through a broker, a reseller, or a dealer with no connection to the community the work comes from.

Pwerle Gallery carries forward the legacy of DACOU (Dreaming Art Centre of Utopia), the family-owned gallery founded by Fred Torres that became firmly entrenched in the contemporary Aboriginal art industry and is recognised as a leading supplier of quality Utopia artwork.

We are the only commercial Indigenous, family-owned gallery working with its own community to have operated as a family collective in this industry, in Australia, for over 40 years, without a single dollar of government funding.

DACOU holds one of the strongest auction track records of any gallery associated with Aboriginal art in Australia; not asserted, but independently recorded by the auction houses themselves.

Commissioned through DACOU in 1994. Sold at Lawson-Menzies in 2007 for $1,056,000, the world record price for Aboriginal art and for an Australian female artist at the time. In 2017, the same painting sold again for $2,100,000, breaking its own record. Both sales carry DACOU’s 1994 provenance on the public auction record.

1996, 180cm x 90cm sold privately in 2008 for $1.1 million.

2002, sold at the Lawson-Menzies (now Menzies) auction in November 2007 for $78,000, the highest auction price recorded for the artist.

Works by Gloria Petyarre have also achieved strong results at auction, with prices reaching into the tens of thousands of dollars, reflecting the same standard of quality and provenance carried across every artist in this family’s history. These aren’t isolated results. They reflect a simple fact: DACOU provenanced work has consistently set and broken the records that define this market.

Work that has passed through DACOU and Pwerle family hands is held in major public and private collections, including:

- Earth's Creation I and Earth's Creation II, now held in the private collection of philanthropist Nicola Forrest
- Emily Kame Kngwarreye & Greeny Purvis: Art Gallery of South Australia
- Minnie Pwerle: Queensland Art Gallery of Modern Art (QAGOMA)
- Barbara Weir: National Gallery of Australia
- Minnie Pwerle & Emily Pwerle: The Corrigan Collection

As a family collective, we have promoted this art through catalogues, publications, and more than 300 exhibitions in prominent galleries nationally and internationally, including:

- The Spirit Sings: Paintings by Emily Kame Kngwarreye - solo exhibition, Tandanya National Aboriginal Cultural Institute, 1997
- African Muse Gallery, travelling group exhibition, Paris, France, 2002
- Knut Grothe Galeri, travelling group exhibition, Charlottenlund, Copenhagen, 2002
- Mixed Utopia Exhibition, Le Temps du Reve Galerie d’Art, France, 2002
- AMP Sydney — the first major exhibition of work by Minnie Pwerle, 2000
- Utopia: The Genius of Emily Kame Kngwarreye — Osaka Museum of Art, Art Centre of Tokyo, National Museum of Australia, 2008
- Robert Steele Gallery, group exhibition, New York, 2007
- Group exhibition, Australian Embassy, Washington, USA, 2007
- Gong Pyeong Arts Space, Seoul, Korea, in conjunction with the Australian Embassy, 2008 & 2010
- Emily Kame Kngwarreye: The Person and Her Paintings — DACOU, Melbourne, 2009, a landmark family-curated exhibition of over 80 original works, attended by John Morse AM and curator Margo Neale