Kathleen Petyarre occupies an important place in contemporary Aboriginal painting: born in the early 1940s, she belongs to the generation that took part in its development in Papunya, Yuendumu and then in the rest of the Australian desert from 1970 onwards. She herself is originally from the Atnagkere territory to the north-east of Alice Springs, and it was in the late 1970s that she and a group of women from Utopia first learned the batik technique, before turning to canvas to create the secret motifs inherited from the Dreamtime, while at the same time leading the land claims movements that were then in full swing. So it was that she first took part in group exhibitions of batik (1980: Utopia Batik, Mona Byrne's Artworks Gallery, Alice Springs) and then of paintings (in 1989 for the first time and since then regularly in Australia and the United States - Boston, in 1990; Passadena, in 1990 etc. - and in Europe - Germany, the Netherlands, etc.).