Ames Yavuz now represents Betty Muffler
31 Jan 2025
Ames Yavuz is proud to announce representation of celebrated Pitjantjatjara artist, Betty Muffler.
Muffler is a senior woman at Iwantja Arts and a revered ngangkari, a traditional Aṉangu healer. She is a highly respected artist, and her contemporary practice has been widely celebrated across Australia and internationally. Muffler was awarded the Emerging Artist Award at the 34th Telstra NATSIAA in 2017 at the esteemed age of 73. She has since been a NATSIAA finalist multiple times and featured in the Tarnanthi Festival in 2015, 2017, and 2020. In 2020, her work Ngangkari Ngura (Healing Country) appeared on the cover of Vogue Australia—the first-time fine art has appeared on magazine’s cover in its 60-year history. She later exhibited at The National 2021 at the Art Gallery of New South Wales and was a finalist for the Wynne Prize, Hadley’s Art Prize, and Arthur Guy Memorial Painting Prize. In 2022, Muffler won the General Painting Award at NATSIAA, was a Wynne Prize finalist, and presented her largest solo work—a five-meter canvas—for ACCA’s Like a Wheel That Turns exhibition. She presented a major commission in collaboration with Maringka Burton in YOYI! Care, Repair, Heal at Gropius Bau and her work was featured at the 14th Gwangju Biennale in 2023. From 2023 to 2024, her monumental Ngangkari Ngura was showcased as part of the NGV Triennial in Melbourne, Australia.
Embracing a subtle monochromatic palette, Muffler creates sublime and sophisticated paintings evoking landscapes that reveal the artist’s reverence for her Country, her ngangkari spirit and her people. Muffler is based in Indulkana on the APY Lands and works at Iwantja Arts. The artist is represented in Australia by Jan Murphy Gallery.
In her debut with Ames Yavuz, Muffler will present Ngangkari Ngura (Healing Country), a series of seven new large-scale paintings at Art Basel Hong Kong’s Encounters sector curated by Alexie Glass-Kantor from 26-30 March 2025 at the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre.
This important body of work continues Muffler’s ongoing personal response to British atomic testing in Australia. Born in 1944 near Watarru, close to the border of South and Western Australia, Muffler survived the British atomic testing conducted at Maralinga and Emu Junction where many of her close family were displaced or died from the catastrophic after-effects. Witnessing the devastating effect this event had on her family and their ancestral Country left a lifelong impact on Muffler that she addresses through her ngangkari practice and the recurring depiction of healing sites in her paintings titled Ngangkari Ngura (Healing Country).
(Top) Image: Betty Muffler on Country, photographed by Rhett Hammerton, courtesy of Iwantja Arts