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Explore past auction results and captivating auction catalogues at Art Leven (formerly Cooee Art). Immerse yourself in the world of Indigenous art and its fascinating heritage. CATALOGUES & RESULTS AUCTIONS AUCTION 18 NOVEMBER 2025 REGISTER TO BID CATALOGUES & RESULTS BUYING FROM CONSIGNING NOW Art Leven (formerly Cooee Art) Auctions provide an informed and professional approach to buying and selling art in the secondary market. We are a market leader with specialist knowledge and proven results offering collectible artworks by Australian First Nations artists for sale by auction and private treaty. FIRST NATIONS FINE ART AUCTION Tuesday 18th November 2025 AEDT 7:00pm FIRST NATIONS FINE ART AUCTION Tuesday 12th November 2024 AEDT 7:00pm The Rod Menzies Estate | Indigenous and Oceanic Art Collection | Part I Wednesday 8th November 2023 INDIGENOUS FINE ART AUCTION 11 October 2022 | 7PM START MODERN & CONTEMPORARY FINE ART AUCTION 24 June 2021 | 7PM Start INDIGENOUS FINE ART AUCTION 20 October 2020 7PM Start INDIGENOUS FINE ART AUCTION 4 June 2019 FIRST NATIONS FINE ART AUCTION Tuesday 17th June 2025 AEST 7:00pm The Rod Menzies Estate | Indigenous Art Collection | Auction Part II Tuesday 5th March 2024 INDIGENOUS FINE ART AUCTION 20 June 2023 INDIGENOUS FINE ART AUCTION 8 March 2022 INDIGENOUS FINE ART AUCTION 8 June 2021 | 7PM Start INDIGENOUS FINE ART AUCTION 23 June 2020 | 7PM Start INDIGENOUS FINE ART AUCTION 3 December 2019 AUCTIONS | REGISTER | CONSIGNING NOW | CATALOGUES & RESULTS | BUYING FROM AUCTION

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FIRST NATIONS FINE ART AUCTION NOVEMBER 2025 Bark Paintings: Country Made Visible Essay by Dr Ksenia Radchenko When you hold a bark painting in your hands, you feel the roughness of bark, the warmth of ochre pressed into fibre, and the rhythm of a hand that worked close to the skin of a tree. The pigments breathe with the grain and curve of the bark, carrying the memory of the tree’s life. Each sheet of stringybark is peeled, cured, and rubbed smooth with stone, creating a dialogue between tree and artist that begins long before the first mark is made. The bark bends slightly as it dries, never perfectly flat, a reminder that this is a living surface, not a canvas but a skin. As Djon Mundine writes, “until recently, bark paintings were the only Aboriginal-created object approaching ‘art’ in Western eyes. They have physical resemblances to Western painting and yet also physical differences.” That difference lies not only in form but in purpose. In Arnhem Land, artists like Yirawala painted to assert “their strong spiritual attachment to the land,” to make visible ancestral law as a defence of place. “For Aboriginal people,” Mundine writes, “art is a cultural expression, a history of a people, a statement of self-definition… a truth of history, and a statement unable to be made in any other way.” Bark painting is therefore Country made visible: the land, law, and memory. [i] From the first collecting expeditions of Baldwin Spencer in 1912 to Tony Tuckson’s 1950s commissions for the Art Gallery of New South Wales, barks travelled a long route from ethnographic specimen to fine art. They were once “revered and yet simultaneously trivialised,” their makers unnamed even as their works hung in museums. By the 1960s, artists at Yirrkala used bark as a political instrument. The Yirrkala Church Panels (1962) and the Bark Petitions (1963) asserted ancestral sovereignty against mining on sacred land. Once read as anthropology, these works are now recognised as foundational to Australia’s political and visual history. In recent years, bark painters have reclaimed this medium as a site of intellectual and aesthetic innovation. Exhibitions such as  Yolŋu Power: The Art of Yirrkala  at the Art Gallery of New South Wales,  Bark Salon  at the Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, and  Madayin: Eight Decades of Aboriginal Bark Painting from Yirrkala  (2023–24), which toured major museums in the United States, have shown bark painting’s evolution from the earliest commissions to its current global resonance. These exhibitions made visible what communities have always known: these works are not relics of a past world but vital expressions of continuing knowledge. Each region gives this practice a distinct voice, yet all share the conviction that art is not an image of the world, but the world seen from within. The intricate figurative imagery of Groote Eylandt, the bold rhythmic  Jilamara  of the Tiwi Islands, the powerful presence of  Wandjina  in the Kimberley, and the politically charged patterning of Arnhem Land all speak to the diversity and endurance of this tradition. No region reveals the inner grammar of bark painting more completely than Arnhem Land, where the surface becomes an active field of law and energy. Here, the  rarrk , fine cross-hatched fields of white, yellow, and red ochre, is not a background pattern but a system of ancestral movement. In the hands of Kunwinjku artists,  rarrk  flickers like heat, delineating form while filling it with life. Arnhem Land barks often carry figures that are both anatomical and spiritual, x-ray beings whose interiors map the land itself. Yolŋu leader Djambawa Marawili explains, “Country cannot talk to you. Luckily, the ancestors thought about it and laid their  miny’tji  on Country… A knowledgeable and wise person can pick up all of those parts and show exactly how they are connected.” [ii]  Through  miny’tji , the sacred designs describing water currents, tides, lightning, and wind, Country finds a tongue. Bark is its breath. Artists of Arnhem land extend bark’s reach beyond ceremony into the global sphere while remaining grounded in the ethics of  gurrutu , the Yolŋu kinship system connecting all beings. Some now work on metal or acetate, or use bright acrylic pigments, yet their practice remains bark-born, translating the pulse of Country into new material languages. Across the water, the Tiwi Islands express their world through  Jilamara , or design. Here, the language of painting is rhythmic and abstract rather than figurative. As Anna Hart notes,  Jilamara  painted on bark, body, or  Tutini  (funerary poles) enacts remembrance and ceremony: visual patterns that connect the living and the dead. [iii]  The Tiwi palette: red, yellow, and white ochre, is applied with a  Kayimwagakimi  comb to create pulsating fields of pattern. The power of Tiwi painting lies in its restraint: there are no figures, only rhythm and structure. This visual language, pre-dating Western abstraction, transforms repetition into philosophy. On Groote Eylandt, bark painting developed a distinctive aesthetic that remains instantly recognisable: a balance of formal precision and spiritual resonance. Groote Eylandt barks are defined by their strong black grounds, against which figures and abstract motifs emerge in vivid red, white, and yellow. Outlined in yellow and filled with parallel or cross-hatched lines, these images, turtles, squids, birds, Macassan praus, and constellations, are not simply decorative but charged with totemic and ancestral meaning. Their visual order and rhythmic clarity reveal what Frederick Rose once called the “aesthetic and magical” motive of this art: compositions that refine rock art conventions into an intentional, formal language. [iv] In the far northwest, the  Wandjina  of the Kimberley appear in chalk-white forms edged with ochre, their wide eyes and closed mouths radiating presence. Ian Crawford described them as “faces of the rain,” beings whose visibility ensures renewal. As Margo Neale observed, their power endures through adaptation: migrating from ro ck to board to canvas without losing authority. [v]  The  Wandjina  do not speak; they look. Their silence is an active force, their gaze returning that of the viewer. Painting here is both image and invocation, an act of care for Country and weather alike. Rather than a precursor to later painting movements, bark painting continues alongside them, evolving and carrying forward ancestral authority. It sustains connections across time and geography, revealing the depth and continuity of cultural practice across northern Australia. As Kupka once called Australian First Nations art “the dawn of art,” his phrase fails to grasp bark’s contemporaneity, an art that never ceased evolving. Mundine reminds us that “Aboriginal people have used our diverse expression and forms to make ourselves visible as the audience for our art grows, and yet paradoxically we appear increasingly invisible.” [vi]  Bark painting continues to counter that invisibility. It is an art that holds both the mark of the hand and the weight of thought, where pigment, surface, and story remain inseparable.   1 John Mundine, “An Aboriginal Soliloquy,” in  They Are Meditating: Bark Paintings from the MCA’s Arnott’s Collection , ed. John Mundine et al. (Sydney: Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, 2008), 15. 2  Yolŋu Power: The Art of Yirrkala , ed. Cara Pinchbeck (Sydney: Art Gallery of New South Wales, 2025), 23 3 Anna Hart, “Body, Design, and Memory in Tiwi Jilamara,”  Art Monthly Australasia , no. 256 (2012): 24–28. 4    Lindy Allen, “The Aesthetic and Magical: Groote Eylandt Bark Painting,” in  They Are Meditating: Bark Paintings from the MCA’s Arnott’s Collection , ed. John Mundine et al. (Sydney: Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, 2008), 70–75. 5  Margo Neale, “Continuity and Change: The Wandjina in Contemporary Art,”  Artlink  26, no. 2 (2006): 52–57, 53. 6 Mundine, “An Aboriginal Soliloquy,” 31.

Important Works by First Nations Artists Welcome to our biannual First Nations Fine Art Auction, to be held in our Redfern gallery on the 18th of November 2025. This auction marks an exciting new chapter in the Australian art market as we introduce two pioneering initiatives: Priority Bidding and Hybrid Auctions, both designed to reimagine how collectors and vendors engage with contemporary auction practices. In addition, we have extended our viewing period to two weeks, presenting the offering both as an auction viewing and a curated exhibition. The Priority Bidding model was launched internationally by Phillips, New York only two months ago and rewards collectors who participate ahead of the auction day by securing a discounted buyer’s premium of only 15%, compared to 25–29% charged by most Australian auction houses. This initiative encourages serious collectors to engage ahead of auction day, ensuring smoother transactions and more competitive bidding outcomes. Further explanation on this process can be found on page 124. The Hybrid Auction merges the convenience and accessibility of online bidding with the excitement of a live auction, combining the best aspects of both formats. Conducted live by the auctioneer from Art Leven’s Redfern showroom, all bidding will take place remotely via phone, absentee, or online platforms, eliminating geographical barriers while retaining the energy and precision of traditional live auctions. At the time of writing this, the uncertain opening of The Stars We Do Not See exhibition in the United States, reflects a shifting international art landscape. The UBS 2025 (1) Global Art Market Report noted that the international auction market was down across all segments with the exception of the under $5,000 mark, which grew in both value (by 7%) and volume (by 13%). Our focus has turned to small yet significant pieces, reflecting the current buyer demand, aiming to separate ourselves from an art market that is often criticised for being increasingly out of touch with the contemporary buyer. Alongside conservatively valued blue-chip pieces by the likes of Mirdidingkingathi Jurwanda Sally Gabori (LOT 16) , Emily Kame Kngwarreye (LOT 17) , Rover Joolama Thomas (LOT 36) , and Lin Onus (LOT 34) , are works in more affordable price ranges, including big name artists, as well selected works by some of the movement’s rising stars. In keeping with this theme, the auction includes a selection of objects including two opalescent glass coolamons by iconic Balgo Artists, Eubena Nampitjin (LOT 11) and Bai Bai Napangardi (LOT 12) . Janice Pungautiji Murray’s Jipiyontongi bird sculpture (LOT 13) , revitalised traditional Tiwi sculpture through the medium of aluminium, a decade before Buku-Larrŋgay Mulka defined the genre. One highlight of this auction is a collection of seven hand-painted ukuleles (LOT 15) by artists including Ronnie Tjampitjinpa, Mervyn Rubuntja, George Hairbrush Tjungurrayi, as well as renowned landscape painter Luke Sciberras. Created during a series of projects facilitated by Carol Ruff for Hula Dreams: An Exhibition of Hand-Painted Ukuleles , they are accompanied by a collection of photographs of the artists as well as a working photo of ‘Australian’ photographer Greg Weight & George Hairbrush Tjungurrayi. Opening this auction are two of Lola Deli Ryan’s iconic shell-covered Sydney Harbour Bridges (LOT 1) , showcasing alternative media, a rarely represented area of the secondary market. In recent years, bark painters have reclaimed their place in the contemporary art dialog with exhibitions such as  Yolŋu Power: The Art of Yirrkala  at the Art Gallery of New South Wales (2025),  Bark Salon  at the Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, and  Madayin: Eight Decades of Aboriginal Bark Painting from Yirrkala  (2023–24), which toured major museums in the United States. These exhibitions have shown bark painting’s evolution from the earliest commissions to its current global resonance. This, in addition to significant advances in their preservation and conservational display techniques, have made bark paintings popular targets for any contemporary collection. LOTS 21–33 and 57–68 represent the diversity of Australia’s Top End artists with examples from every region known for traditional bark painting. Including the Arnhem Land master John Mawurndjul (LOT 25) , celebrated contemporary Yolŋu artist Dhambit Munuŋgurr (LOT 21) and the fine rarrk of Narritjin Maymuru (LOT 24) . From the Kimberly’s, featuring the powerful presence of Waigan Djanghara’s Wandjina (LOT 6) , to the dramatic contrasting pigments of the Groote Eylandt barks, and an Unknown Artist who renders a rhythmic portrayal of the Jilamara ceremony (LOT 28) . The cover lot features a powerful image of Rover Joolama Thomas’ Bow River Station (LOT 4) , is complemented by another work by Thomas, Yillimbiddi Country, (LOT 36) painted for Waringarri Aboriginal Arts in 1989. A personal favourite, Pinkalarta (LOT 49) painted in 2005, is the largest work ever offered at auction by Yulparija artist Alma Webou Kalaju. Ngoia Pollard Napaltjarri’s piece, Swamps near Nyrripi (LOT 38) , shimmers and mesmerises with detail alongside a serious masterwork by Warlpiri favourite Dorothy Robinson Napangardi, Karntakurlangu (LOT 39) , painstakingly painted from 2009 to 2010, is another major highlight. This season’s auction captures the extraordinary depth, innovation, and integrity of First Nations Art, from ceremonial origins to contemporary experimentation. We invite you to join us for our extended viewing and to experience, firsthand, the future of art auctions through our new Priority Bidding and Hybrid Auction platforms. (1) Note 3.4 of the Art Basel UBS 2025 Global Art Market Report. Emma Lenyszyn First Nations Fine Art Specialist October, 2025

Carol Puruntatameri (1959 - ) For Aboriginal artist Carol Puruntatameri, painting is not only a form of creative expression, but a continuation of ceremony—a way to sing to Country, call the Ancestors close, and reaffirm cultural responsibilities. Her bark paintings emerge from a living tradition that connects her directly with land, kinship, and ancestral law. Tiwi Bark Painting and Ceremony Unlike many mainland bark painters who centre ancestral narratives and Miny’tji  (sacred clan designs), Tiwi bark painting follows a distinct framework. Here, ceremonial performance, kinship, and geography converge through intricate geometric designs such as Pwanga , Jilamara , and Marlipinyini . Passed down matrilineally, these designs are worn during Kulama (coming-of-age) ceremonies and mortuary rituals. When painted on bark, they become portals to Tiwi history, memory, and cultural law. A Family of First Nations Artists Carol Puruntatameri is part of an extended family of First Nations artists who have been central to the revitalisation of Tiwi cultural expression. Among them is her uncle Paddy Freddy Puruntatameri, a senior lawman and respected artist who passed down knowledge to her from an early age. Immersed in ceremony and culture, Carol has developed a practice rooted in the old ways but carried forward with her own artistic voice. The Story of Purrukuparli A central theme in her painting is the story of Purrukuparli, the ancestral Tiwi man whose decision brought mortality into the world. According to Tiwi law, Purrukuparli’s wife Bima left their infant son Jinani in the shade while she searched for food. Distracted too long, she returned to find him dead in the heat of the sun. In grief, Purrukuparli refused Tapara the Moon Man’s offer to revive the child, instead carrying Jinani into the ocean at Yipali beach. Their footprints remain visible at low tide. From this story, death became a part of human existence. Tapara escaped into the sky to become the crescent moon, whose scars are reminders of this moment. For the Tiwi people, this creation story explains the balance between life and death, much as Adam and Eve do in Christianity. Painting as Indigenous Art and Ceremony Carol Puruntatameri’s bark paintings are defined by finely controlled dotting and precise line work that draw inspiration from Jilamara , the body designs painted during mourning, celebration, and initiation. Her brushwork translates the rhythms of ancestral dance and Tiwi songlines into painted form. As the artist explains: “I’m painting the old ways for the new generation.” In this way, her Indigenous art is not simply a visual record, but a continuation of ceremonial practice and cultural law. Materials from Country All of Carol’s materials are prepared in accordance with Tiwi tradition. Bark is harvested from stringybark trees on Melville Island and flattened in the wet season. Ochres are dug from Country, ground into pigment, and mixed with water and natural fixatives. Brushes are made from pandanus root or human hair. Each step of the process affirms Carol’s connection to land, Ancestors, and cultural responsibility. Biography Carol Puruntatameri (1959– ) is a Tiwi Aboriginal artist from Yermalner (Melville Island) in the Northern Territory of Australia. Her bark paintings, particularly those depicting the story of Purrukuparli, are recognised as powerful statements of Tiwi identity, history, and cultural continuity. Her work is part of a broader movement of Indigenous art that preserves ceremonial knowledge while engaging with the contemporary world. For Carol, each bark painting is an act of survival and transmission: “Ngarukuruwala Kapi Murrakupuni means ‘we sing to the land.’ That’s what we’re doing when we paint—we’re calling our ancestors to walk with us.”