An Exhibition of Watercolors by Winnie Bamara

[Adelaide] : [‘The Sunday Mail’], February 1959. Exhibition catalogue. Octavo, folded sheet with a portrait photograph of the artist reproduced on the first page, fine.

‘Sponsored by “The Sunday Mail”. Public Library Lecture Room, North Terrace, from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., February 17-24, 1959’; 29 paintings listed, with prices on all but the four items not for sale.

‘Winnie Bamara is a 19-year-old aboriginal living in the Umeewarra Aborigines Mission Station, Port Augusta. She has been there since she was seven. Her art has three remarkable aspects: She has never had a lesson. She does not jot down even one line of a scene she is to paint; she records the scene in her mind and paints it when she returns to the Mission. She has an extraordinarily acute photographic mind. Her painting is completely in the European style’ (introductory note).

‘Winnie Bamara (born 1939 or 1940; – 1987) was the first Indigenous Australian woman artist to paint in a European realist style. Her ability to paint scenes accurately and solely from memory attracted wide attention in the 1950s. She was hailed as a “female Albert Namatjira”‘ – Wikipedia.

Rare.