An Aboriginal artist, Sylvia Ken is from the Amata community in the Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara (APY) lands in South Australia. In 2019 she won the Art Gallery of New South Wales’s (AGNSW) Wynne Prize for a painting also titled ‘Seven Sisters’.

A recurring tenet of Ken’s work, Seven Sisters tells of how the Pleiades and Orion constellations were created. According to the story, a group of women were fleeing the advances of a bad man, traversing the Central Australian desert. As Ken states, “I listen to the old people’s stories and I think about these stories and then the ideas come for my paintings… I listen when they are talking about tjukurpa and telling creation stories, and when they say to me, “No, you should paint this way, the Seven Sisters”.”

Painted in her signature palette of rich reds, purples and oranges, ‘Seven Sisters’ is a profoundly beautiful work. Ken is a leading Aboriginal artist, a repeated finalist in the Telstra National Indigenous Art Award and represented at the AGNSW, the Art Gallery of South Australia and the Queensland Art Gallery of Modern Art.

For collectors of Aboriginal and landscape, the highly collectable ‘Seven Sisters’ is a miraculous find.

Sylvia KEN (1965 - )
'Seven Sisters'
acrylic on canvas
Image Size: 153 x 122 cm
Dimensions: 153 x 122 x 2 cm
Signed: Inscribed on verso: Sylvie Ken #181 - 10 Tjula Arts, Amata; comes with a Certificate of Authenticity from Tjala Arts

Exhibited:
Desert Mob 2010, Araluen Centre, Alice Springs, 10 September - 24 October 2010, cat. TJL06.

Condition: Excellent

(c) Sylvia Ken / Copyright Agency