If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, then artists from central Australia should be feeling fantastic about Damien Hirst's latest works — but instead they're experiencing a mixture of hurt and bewilderment.

The community of Utopia near Alice Springs produces a unique style of dot art that is internationally renowned, especially the paintings of the late pioneer Emily Kame Kngwarreye.

Now, they're upset to see a new exhibition by Hirst, the world's most commercial artist, which they believe bears a striking resemblance to their own work.

The provocative British artist's latest exhibition is 24 paintings called the Veil series.

Priced from $US500,000 to $US1.7 million each, they were all snapped up soon after going on display at the Gagosian Gallery in Beverly Hills.

Hirst held court at the opening party earlier this month, attended by showbiz elite, wealthy collectors, and a queue of thousands that snaked around the block.

Polly Ngale at her home in Utopia, north-east of Alice Springs. With her is her granddaughter, Miranda. ( ABC News: Tom Hancock )

Inside, Kanye West, Miranda Kerr, Michael Douglas, and movie producer Brian Glazer mingled with leading lights from art and fashion; David Hockney, Ed Ruscha, Frank Gehry, Tom Ford, Calvin Klein and Vera Wang.

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Hirst said the series was a nod to European art, inspired partly by French Post-Impressionists Georges Seurat and Pierre Bonnard.

In Alice Springs, Utopia elder and traditional painter Barbara Weir said she believed she could see in Hirst's pictures a strong influence of her aunty Polly Ngale, and Emily Kngwarreye — the most successful painter in the history of contemporary Indigenous art.

Ms Weir said Utopia artists layered their work with meaning.

"The painting [we're] talking about has been passed down by Emily's father, the same with Polly," she said. "It's not a made-up one, it's a very important story."

The Utopia painting style is unique to their desert tradition and rendered on canvas in the hope young people will learn about their past.

"It's a very important story, before it was done on the canvas it was done on our body and the story was passed down," Ms Weir said.

The desert dot paintings are often aerial landscapes painted from memory over many painstaking hours.

Barbara Weir admires a painting by Galya Pwerle on display at the Kate Owen Gallery in Sydney. ( Supplied: Kellie Stewart )

Artists are expected to complete each picture without assistance, and each painter has a distinctive style.

"It actually hurts very much because shouldn't people, if they're artists themselves, they shouldn't be doing something that belongs to someone else," Ms Weir said.

"The one that [we're] talking about is done exactly like my people's story. It was done by Emily and Polly Ngale. If he did copy that, he had no right.

"It looked too much like Utopia art."

The Utopia painting style is unique to their desert tradition. ( ABC News: Tom Hancock )

Hirst 'inspired by Pointillist techniques, Post-Impressionist painters'

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Hirst was unavailable for an interview but a spokeswoman said the Veil paintings were, "inspired by Pointillist techniques and Impressionist and Post-Impressionist painters such as Bonnard and Seurat".

"Damien was unaware of the work or artist in question but he has huge respect for the importance of the value of art in all cultures," the spokeswoman said.

Hirst shot to attention during the Young British Artists movement of the 1990s, building his career by referencing the great international art movements.

He achieved international notoriety when he put a shark in a fish tank and called it art. It was an artistic nod to Marcel Duchamp's urinal piece, Fountain.

He later had a human skull encrusted with $US40m worth of diamonds and sold it for $US50m.

Hirst has at different times engaged assistants to execute his ideas. In 2012 he told Time Magazine he had painted just 25 out of the hundreds of spot pictures that went on display simultaneously in nine cities.

Hirst with his shark preserved in formaldehyde, entitled The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living. ( Reuters: Toby Melville )

For the Veil series, which grossed an estimated $US18 million, he told The New York Times he painted each work exclusively himself.

Emily Kngwarreye is by any metric Australia's most successful Indigenous artist. Her vast, 8-metre-long Big Yam Dreaming was a focal point of the Royal Academy of London's 2013 Australia spotlight exhibition.

Her work has been displayed in Paris, New York, Tokyo and London, among many other cities, and her works included in the annual Australian Aboriginal art auctions held by Sotheby's London.

Twenty years after her death, her work still enjoys commercial success. In July, pop star and avid art collector Elton John sold Kngwarreye's My Country for $500,000 in a high-profile auction.

In December, her Earth's Creation I achieved a record sale price for a female Indigenous artist when it sold for $2.1m at auction in Sydney.

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'The work is very similar'

Indigenous artist and Arts Law Centre board member Bronwyn Bancroft said she believed she could see the hallmarks of desert painting in Hirst's new series.

"I was a little bit shocked when I saw them cause I thought they could have been passed [off] as some Utopian work," she said.

"You can't actually copyright style … [but] in many ways it's what's called a moral copyright element.

"[There's] a moral obligation, I think, on behalf of Damien Hirst to indicate the influence for this last series of work actually came from an Aboriginal art movement," she said.

"That's the least that could have been done.

"If you're probably one of the leading artists in the world and probably one of the best-paid artists in the world, if you can't come up with an original idea, I think you must be lacking something."

Hirst's spokeswoman said his works were in fact a development of a series he made between 1993-1995 called Visual Candy.

Bancroft said she believed it was "obvious" Hirst's work had been influenced by Aboriginal art.

"What Damien has done in this collection is, the work is very similar to [an] Aboriginal art movement," she said.

"[He's] an artist of repute and his attribution has only been to the Pointillist art movement and the Impressionist art movement, and no referencing whatsoever to the Aboriginal art movement."

Bronwyn Bancroft said she thought Hirst's work was very similar to Aboriginal art. ( ABC News: Gordon Fuad )

Aboriginal art 'has come from the desert'

Art dealer Adam Knight said Australia's fragile Indigenous art industry was the most successful enterprise of Aboriginal communities.

"In the Northern Territory there's thousands of artists and they don't just support themselves, they support their extended family networks," he said.

"So it's a significant income generator for the Aboriginal community all across Australia.

"They have not been inspired by previous art movements and that's what's probably the most disappointing thing about this."

Aboriginal art "has come from the desert, from the sand, through dreamings and stories, and that's why it's so important," he added. "We don't want this sort of thing to happen again or to continue to happen.

"There's nothing wrong with being influenced by Aboriginal art, the Aboriginal people take great comfort in that, but I just feel these are so similar.

"The whole collection that's been released is so identical to the works I've seen through my eyes over the last 27 years in Aboriginal art."