A Canadian estate sale bargain is about to deliver a 200 times return
A wood carving snapped up at an estate clearance in Canada for the price of lunch is poised to deliver a whopping return to the bargain hunter who sent it to Australia for auction in the country of its making.
Alec Mingelmanganu’s Double Wanjina, c. 1978, hangs in Deutscher + Hackett’s Sydney viewing rooms and is estimated to fetch $8000 to $12,000 in the firm’s Important Australian Indigenous Art sale in Melbourne on March 26
But only in January, Double Wanjina was in a job lot of oddments, including what appears online to be a Sepik mask, when a Canadian auction house dispersed the varied collections of a clock-maker called Ray Saunders who died in November.
A keen-eyed woman scooped up the box of items for $C52 ($57).
She photographed the strangely beautiful carving, ran a Google image search, and quickly realised she had just bought a work by the man the National Gallery of Australia calls “the greatest of the contemporary Wanjina artists of the Kimberley”.
Alec Mingelmanganu died in 1981, the year after his first solo exhibition in Perth. It seems likely that Ray Saunders collected the carving on a visit to Australia, where he is known to have made some of his famous clocks.
Double Wanjina is a delicately carved and engraved piece measuring 47.5 x 10 cm, with the wanjina or spirit figure picked out in natural earth pigments.
The carving hangs in a sea of canvases in Deutscher + Hackett’s Sydney viewing, on until Sunday before transferring to Melbourne.
One such work is the auction catalogue’s cover lot, Emily Kam Kngwarreye’s Untitled (Awelye), 1992, which measures a commanding 164 x 228 cm and carries an estimate of $400,000 to $600,000 – the highest estimate of the 75 lots in the auction.
Untitled (Awelye) has a fascinating history. Its first buyer was the late Allens chairman Hugh Jamieson, who established the well-known art collection of that law firm.
The work has been exhibited in Tokyo, Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne and Canberra. It was shown at the Sharjah Biennial in 2023 in the United Arab Emirates.
It’s been sold by Deutscher + Hackett previously, most recently in 2013 for $168,000 (including buyer’s premium), when it went into the private collection in Brisbane that is now divesting it.
Infused with sadness is Djerrkŋu Yunupiŋu’s bark painting, Yemaya, 2020, in which the artist commemorates the passing of her great-granddaughter.
“Here she is with her beautiful parents,” reads a quote from the artist in the certificate of authenticity accompanying the work, whose estimate is $20,000 to $30,000. The work was bought through Alcaston Gallery in Melbourne for $10,500 in 2021.
Yunupiŋu’s famous family encompasses her siblings including Galarrwuy Yunupiŋu, the community leader and native title activist who died in 2023.
Switching pace, the auction features two lots by the Indulkana artist Vincent Namatjira, great-grandson of Albert Namatjira who surely rivals his famed ancestor for popularity.
In his painting, The Queen and Me, 2017, Vincent Namatjira deftly creates a psychological tension, although not a hostile one, between himself and the late monarch. Each appears slightly uncomfortable, although curious, in the presence of the other.