The Top Ten Highest-Selling Artworks by Australian Women

A look at the record-setting works collectors are chasing hardest.

This week, we’re turning the spotlight to the women who have shaped, and are still shaping, the Australian art market. And the numbers speak for themselves: you won’t get much change from a million dollars (if any) for the works in this top ten.

What stands out most is the momentum. A small group of artists appears repeatedly, and in many cases their strongest works are now selling well above estimate. Even within a relatively tight field, the pressure on pricing is unmistakable, and major pieces are being chased harder than ever. We’ll explore the wider field of Australian female artists in a future issue.

I’ve also included results from Art Leven (formerly Cooee Art), whose sales of Emily Kame Kngwarreye’s work are too significant to ignore. With Kngwarreye currently the subject of a major exhibition at the Tate Modern in London, her international profile is rising fast and that momentum is likely to continue flowing back into the secondary market.

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#10 Bronwyn Oliver Sun

Sold for $859k at Smith & Singer in 2024. Bronwyn Oliver’s Sun is a compact but unmistakable example of her hand-formed copper sculptures, built with the precision and patience that defined her work. With fewer than 300 pieces produced before her early death in 2006, her output was always limited, and strong demand continues to push results higher. Sun confirms why Oliver is now regarded as one of the most sought-after Australian artists in the sculpture market.

#9 Emily Kame Kngwarreye Earth Creation II

Sold for $859k at Art Leven (formerly Cooee Art) in 2023. Painted in the same 1994 workshop as Earth’s Creation I (#1 on this list), this companion work shows Kngwarreye working with a cooler, more restrained palette. Blues and whites dominate, with small touches of red, creating a calmer surface while retaining the same direct, physical application of paint. Though smaller in scale, Earth’s Creation II carries the key elements of her late style: broad gestures, layered dots and a move away from the yam-root tracery of her earlier years. The two works together mark a pivotal moment in her practice, when her painting shifted decisively into large, open fields of colour that helped establish her international reputation.

#8 Grace Cossington Smith The reader (the school cape)

Sold for $982k at Deutscher and Hacket in 2025. Painted in 1916, this is one of Cossington Smith’s earliest modernist works and a rare example from this period still in private hands. Her sister Madge sits reading in the hooded Abbotsleigh school cape, captured in the small, bright strokes that would become a hallmark of her style. Even at this early stage, the clarity and confidence of her colour and composition mark it as a significant painting from the very beginning of her long career.

#7 Rosalie Gascoigne Marmalade

Sold for $920k at Smith & Singer in 2023. Marmalade comes from Gascoigne’s celebrated series using retro-reflective road signs—one of the most recognisable materials in her practice. By cutting and rearranging the bright yellow panels into grids and fragments of text, she turned functional signage into something rhythmic and abstract, closer to poetry than traffic control. This body of work marked a key shift in her career, running in parallel with the Schweppes-crate pieces, and Marmalade is a strong example of why these sign works remain so sought after.

#6 Rosalie Gascoigne Beaten Track

Sold for $1.04m at Deutscher and Hackett in 2022, well past it’s $400 - $600k estimate. Where Marmalade shows Gascoigne’s bold, high-contrast sign works, Beaten Track represents the other major thread of her practice: the weathered Schweppes-crate constructions. The crate works have a more natural, grounded feel, built from worn timber and lettered fragments that echo the Monaro region she knew so well. Together, Marmalade and Beaten Track capture the two materials that define much of Gascoigne’s most collected work, distinct in style, but recognisably hers.

#5 Emily Kame Kngwarreye Untitled (Awelye)

Sold for $1.20m at Deutscher and Hackett in 2025, eclipsing its $400 - $600k estimate. Painted in 1992 during Kngwarreye’s high-colour period, Untitled (Awelye) is built from blocks of bright pinks, oranges, blues and maroons layered through dense fields of dots. This was a turning point in her practice, when she moved away from the fine yam-root tracery of her early work and began experimenting with larger gestures and a much broader palette. The result is a lively, confident painting that captures both her deep connection to Country and the surge of creativity that defined this short but important phase in her career.

#4 Ethel Carrick Fox Sur la Plage (On the Sands), Dinard 1911

Sold for $1.20m at Smith & Singer in 2022, this was well past its $600 - $800k estimate. Painted during her summers on the French coast, Sur la Plage shows Carrick Fox working outdoors with quick, lively strokes and a bright modern palette. The striped tents, sunlit sand and relaxed Belle Époque figures give the painting a sense of immediacy and charm, while the colour and movement reflect the influence of contemporary French painting. Fresh, elegant and distinctly her own, it’s a standout example of why her beach scenes remain so sought after.

#3 Bronwyn Oliver Tide

Sold for $1.23m at Smith & Singer in 2024. At four metres long, Tide is one of Oliver’s most ambitious copper works and now the most expensive Australian sculpture at auction. Commissioned for the restaurant Quay and held by the same family for 25 years, it’s a rare large-scale piece from an artist whose works seldom reach the market. Its result reflects both its scarcity and Oliver’s growing reputation as a major figure in contemporary Australian art.

#2 Ethel Carrick Fox The Market 1919

Sold for $1.46m at Smith & Singer (formerly Sotheby’s) in 2019. This same work previously set a record for in 2008 when it sold for $1.01m. Carrick Fox returned often to market scenes, drawn to their colour, light and constant movement, and The Market is one of her strongest examples. Painted in Paris soon after WWI, it brings together shaded walkways, bright produce and a mix of figures passing through the scene, all handled with her fast, confident brushwork. It’s a large, confident painting from the peak of her Paris years, and the clarity of the composition shows exactly why works from this period are so highly regarded.

#1 Emily Kame Kngwarreye Earth’s Creation 1, 1994

Sold for $2.1m at Art Leven (formerly Cooee Art) in 2017. It previously sold in 2007 for $1.06m. Earth’s Creation I is widely regarded as the most important painting of Kngwarreye’s career. It is a huge, all-encompassing canvas painted on the ground in a single sustained session. This was the peak of her late “high-colour” period, when she worked with layered, double-dipped brushes to create dense passages of colour across the entire surface. The scale, confidence and immediacy of the mark-making give the work an unusually expansive presence, and it remains the highest publicly recorded price for any Australian female artist. It has come to represent both the ambition of her late practice and the international recognition her work continues to attract.

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Two Emily Kame Kngwarreye works have sold in the US that would each qualify for this list if I were including works sold outside Australia. Alhalkere - Old Man Emu with Babies, 1989 sold at Sotheby’s for $819,000 USD in 2022 and Summer Celebration sold at Sotheby’s in 2019 for $596,000 USD.

Honourable mentions to Bessie Davidson, Margaret Preston, Del Kathryn Barton, Cressida Campbell and Isobel Rae. Each of these artists have had works sell for over $500k.

As mentioned earlier, we’ll look at the depth of talented Australian female artists in a future newsletter. For now, this top ten gives a clear snapshot of where collector demand is heading, and which names are leading the way.