ALWAYS CONTEMPORARY With a bold silhouette that conveys movement even at standstill, the Range Rover Sport is striking from every angle. EXPLORE

Peter Doig, Country Rock (1998-99). Photo: Courtesy of Christie’s

Christie’s announced that it will feature the collection of Ole Faarup during the Frieze week sales in London this October. Beginning October 15, the house will sell 140 works with a combined estimate of £16 million ($22 million). The top works in the late Danish businessman’s collection are two paintings by Peter Doig. Ski Jacket, from 1994, is estimated at £6 million ($8.1million), and Country Rock, from 1998-99, is estimated at £7 million ($9.5 million). A different version of Country Rock sold for nearly $14.5 million in 2014, but was resold at auction eight years later for just above $9.5 million. Another work, House of Pictures, from 2000, also traded down from just over $9.1 million in 2018 to just above $7.5 million in 2023.

The collection, which Faarup amassed over five decades, also contains works by Chris Ofili, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Mamma Andersson, Ewa Juszkiewicz, Hernan Bas, and Neo Rauch. Proceeds from the sale will benefit the collector’s eponymous foundation. Now for the main event…

ALWAYS CONTEMPORARY With a bold silhouette that conveys movement even at standstill, the Range Rover Sport is striking from every angle. EXPLORE

For much of the wider world, the first introduction to Australian Indigenous culture came through Bruce Chatwin’s bestselling book Songlines, published in 1987. The work was based upon trips that Chatwin made to the Australian outback in 1983 and ’84, accompanying a railroad surveyor who was trying to plot a path between the sacred lands of the Indigenous peoples who lived there. Yes, as late as the 1980s, Australians of European descent and Indigenous peoples were still sometimes encountering each other for the very first time. Through his brief time spent with these nomads, Chatwin became fascinated with their “songlines,” which fused an individual’s story with a deep connection to the land, the surrounding community, and their ancestors.

Chatwin, who had risen through the ranks at Sotheby’s to become the head of both the antiquities and impressionist art departments before leaving to become a travel writer, thought that the ancient practices of Australia’s Indigenous offered a clue to the origins of language, as well as a direct link to humanity’s prehistory and an atavistic shared unconscious. He may have had some extravagant, even fanciful ideas, but his interest in the Aboriginal people—and their art—was not unique. A decade before Chatwin arrived, Australians had begun to make efforts to record the culture of the Aboriginal people, whose land they had enclosed for 50 years. By the 1970s, the inherited visual vocabulary of Indigenous religious and social practices had already started to migrate from sand and body painting onto substrates that could be preserved and sold. The first Aboriginal artists were primarily men, using their cultural knowledge and authority to create paintings that shared a lineage with Chatwin’s songlines. In 1971-72, Aboriginal men had begun to paint ceremonial patterns on found objects and construction materials. These images were formally structured and strictly regulated by elders. In a culture that used the term “secret men’s business” without irony, Aboriginal women were forbidden to paint until 1996—at least officially. But many took up the practice before the cultural laws were loosened. In her Utopia women’s camp in the 1970s, Kngwarray was part of an effort to teach Aboriginal women skills that might provide them with income, one of which was batik, a textile dyeing technique. Despite skepticism from the authorities—batik had no direct bearing on their culture—Kngwarray and her peers took to the process with enthusiasm, drawing from a rich tradition of ceremony as well as a connection to their environment and their own cosmology. After 10 years of making batiks, Kngwarray started painting, making some 3,000 works in the last eight years of her life, or nearly one a day. Born in 1910, Kngwarray’s life experience tracks the Aboriginal peoples’ encounter with the modern world—and indeed, she died at the age of 86, in the same year that the authorities lifted restrictions on female painting. The burst of creative output at the end of her life can be seen as a race to record her embattled but extremely ancient and durable culture.

Even during her lifetime, Kngwarray stood out among Aboriginal artists. “The market has really rallied around her from the beginning,” Davidson said. “Everything she painted was sold. The demand around her was huge. During her life, her paintings were selling at auction for record prices.” In 2008, according to Davidson, who then worked at Sotheby’s, a Kngwarray painting was sold to an Australian collector for $1.3 million just before the global financial crisis. Davidson says he just resold it to the National Gallery of Australia for $1.65 million. But that is the rare work of an Aboriginal artist to have held its value. Davidson told me it is still possible to buy important works for as little as $20,000–$30,000.

The market for Aboriginal art has been bedeviled by two different types of speculation. As interest in Australian Indigenous art exploded in the late 1990s and early 2000s, a number of unscrupulous dealers flocked to the Outback stations to commission work by native artists, who were often exploited. As a result, provenance and fair practices have become a dividing line in the market for Aboriginal artworks like Kngwarray’s.

Installation view of Emily Kam Kngwarray at Tate Modern (2025). Photo: Kathleen Arundell/Courtesy of Emily Kam Kngwarray Copyright Agency and Tate

The Kngwarray work now considered legitimate originates through two different dealers, Rodney Gooch and Janet and Donald Holt. “Outside of those two lines of provenance,” Davidson said, “it’s a two-speed economy”—Kngwarray’s works with recognized provenance have seen their prices rise over time, while works she made for quick cash through carpetbaggers have not.

Davidson says his business took off in recent years once he started setting aside a portion of his profits to return to the communities where the art is made. To him, this is an indication that the market is shunning exploitative works. “Collectors who try to take shortcuts usually get their fingers burnt,” he warned. That’s not the only challenge the Aboriginal art market has faced. First, Australia instituted a resale royalty for Aboriginal art in 2010, but the record-keeping burden caused many to shy away from trading in these works. Self-managed retirement funds, which were allowed to invest in collectibles including Aboriginal art, had also contributed greatly to demand for the paintings—until the introduction of new restrictions on such investments in 2011 abruptly ended that demand. Also, cultural-property export laws, designed to restrict the international sale of historical artifacts, limited the export of artworks made to generate income for native communities. All these different constraints combined to kill the international market for Aboriginal art for much of the 2010s. It was only in 2019, when the export laws changed, that the market began to stir again. At that point, Davidson said, “It was like a tap was turned on.” He’s been developing a market in New York. And he partnered with Pace in London to put on a selling exhibition, in tandem with the Kngwarray retrospective, where he managed to sell seven paintings, one for $1.5 million. Pace, too, has brought some contemporary art collectors to the table by showing Kngwarray’s works at fairs like Frieze and Art Basel in Miami and Basel. They also made significant sales from the London show. And Pace isn’t the only gallery getting in on the action: Salon 94 and Karma galleries have both represented Aboriginal artists. Meanwhile, Pace has been educating the market as to the stylistic breadth of Kngwarray’s work. On their website, curator Anne Brody underscored how unlikely it was that Kngwarray would emerge from a remote batik project through two landmark art projects and become “an art world superstar.” But she also recognized that Kngwarray’s fame was no accident. “Kngwarray had what it took and the desire to get there,” she wrote, “a big personality, huge talent, great energy, and the culturally deep authority to make the journey.”

Perhaps you saw The New York Times’s announcement yesterday that St. Patrick’s Cathedral on Fifth Avenue will unveil a new, large-scale mural in the entry vestibule by painter Adam Cvijanovic. The work will depict immigrants but also commemorate a religious event close to retiring Cardinal Timothy Dolan’s heart. Did you notice that Dolan made a conscious choice to employ a realist artist to make this statement about immigration and its unique role in New York life? Six artists made proposals. But Dolan and his advisors were keen to work with Cvijanovic: “The rest of them were a little too Picasso-like,” Dolan told the Times. “I wanted something that people could look at and see the Holy Apparition at Knock, and not that you’d have to be on LSD to figure it out.”

That’s it for today. I’m taking next week off, but you’ll be in good hands. M

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