While the late Indigenous artist Sally Gabori is being feted in the top echelons of Paris, a tragic subplot of theft and deception swirls in the background.
an exhausting couple of days for Dorothy and Amanda Gabori. They’ve made the taxing 1800-kilometre journey by plane from their homes on Mornington Island in the Gulf of Carpentaria all the way to Brisbane, facing delays, a cancelled flight and an unscheduled night in Cairns.
I meet Amanda, 56, and Dorothy, 64, at their Brisbane hotel with their helper, the gentle Sue Lee, who’s known the family for more than a decade and was with them by Gabori’s side when the artist died in 2015, aged 91. Brett Evans was the long-standing manager of the Mirndiyan Gununa Aboriginal Corporation, commonly known as the Mornington Island Art Centre, where Gabori’s painting life began in 2005. Evans played a central role in promoting Gabori’s early career, but in February this year he was sentenced by the Mount Isa District Court to
Before then, Gabori was known foremost as a shy grandmother with a talent for weaving. Belonging to the last coastal-living Aboriginal people to come into contact with Europeans, she barely spoke English and could not write her name. The traditional owners of Mornington Island are the Lardil people, and the Kaiadilt believed they were only moving there temporarily. They would not return to Bentinck Island until the 1990s, however, when a small housing development was established on the island, at Nyinyilki, following land rights battles. Sally and Pat Gabori were among those who returned and resumed their traditional way of life. But their homecoming was short-lived.
Seven months after her first painting workshop, Gabori had her first solo exhibition, at the Woolloongabba Art Gallery that same year. Her canvases jostled with tightly-packed, colourful circles that referred to the glistening schools of fish on Bentinck Island: big black mullet, mangrove jack, black bream, yellow fish. There were paintings, too, of a turtle nest, a crocodile, rock cod swimming, hunting grounds, all rendered in big, bright, blocks of colour.
Knight held a solo Gabori exhibition practically every year after that and could be rightly said to have built the market for the artist, who she has represented as her primary dealer from late 2005. “We’ve never not had a sell-out exhibition of Sally’s work,” Knight tells me. A qualified teacher, Evans arrived on Mornington Island in 1982 from Grafton, NSW, and taught for a couple of years before holding various other jobs. He started at the art centre in 1990, when it was still known as the Woomera Aboriginal Corporation. In 2005, he was appointed its co-ordinator, a role that required him to work closely with artists, supplying and preparing their materials, managing their sales and promoting their work.
Gabori was prolific, producing more than 2000 paintings in the last 10 years of her life. But not all of these were considered suitable for sale. Brett Evans is married to a local artist, Emily Evans, a Lardil woman with whom he has three children. Without excusing the crime, Nicholas Evans offers another perspective on the man. “He was someone who was helping things happen,” Evans says. “As the art centre co-ordinator, he took some decisive early steps which meant that not only Sally but that whole Kaiadilt art movement took off, encouraging her, giving her a paint brush, saying, ‘Look, this could work.
But the law is one thing, perception another. In the art trade, provenance – an artwork’s sales history – is paramount, and for some collectors the knowledge that these paintings were initially sold dishonestly may dampen their enthusiasm for owning one. As Judith Ryan puts it, “Once we have someone jailed for such an offence, it means that the works that changed hands as a result of this are tainted, so collectors would not necessarily want those on their walls.
Court documents show that among the other buyers of the Gaboris from Evans are a medical practitioner, Andrew Clift, who travelled to Mornington Island between 2009 and 2011 as part of his work with the Mount Isa Base Hospital. Over two years, Clift bought a total of 60 works, paying $90,000 in total .
According to the court documents, from March 2013 to June 2014 Corrigan purchased 83 paintings by Gabori from Evans, although he emphasises to me that he never dealt with Evans directly, leaving Adam Knight to do business for him. “This was a fun thing to do,” he says. “Can’t some people work out – certainly Beverly can’t – there’s got to be some fun in this whole art thing? The whole thing is meant to be a happy venture.” He proudly shows me the letter from ORIC thanking him for his co-operation in the investigation.Getty Images
“I had no evidence up until then what was going on. All I knew was that there were occasional poor works appearing on the market, and people were thinking they were fakes. Artists’ works are open to reassessment, Knight explains, and part of the process a dealer goes through entails returning to certain works and looking at them afresh.
Knight also asked the auction house Deutscher and Hackett to check in with her on any Gabori paintings from Corrigan that might be coming up for sale while the Brett Evans case was ongoing. It agreed. Navigating the situation was delicate for auction house co-founder Chris Deutscher, who has dealt with Pat Corrigan for 40-odd years. “I think the works are great, there is nothing wrong with them,” Deutscher tells me. “When I saw D’Lan’s catalogue, I was envious.
“I said to myself, immediately, and to everyone around me at the Fondation, ‘Let’s do it!’ ” Chandès tells me by video from Paris. “I was completely overwhelmed … by the colours, by the composition, the scale, the size, the beauty, the space. Really, it was shocking. Shocking! And so beautiful.”
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