Emily Kam Kngwarray

My Country will trace Kngwarray’s artistic evolution from her early organic forms to her later vibrant, dot-filled color fields, culminating in the minimalist compositions that defined her mature work. To reflect her profound influence on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander artists, as well as on women artists and the Australian art landscape more broadly, the exhibition will also include historical and contemporary batiks by artists inspired by Kngwarray’s pioneering practice.

Emily Kam Kngwarray (ca. 1914–96) is one of Australia’s most critically acclaimed contemporary artists. Her use of new art media began in the 1970s, when she began working with batik at Ankerrapw (Utopia Station homestead) in Australia’s Northern Territory.After developing a distinctive style with little external influence, she shifted from batik to acrylic on canvas in 1988, marking the start of an extraordinary eight-year painting career during which she is estimated to have created around 3,000 works.

The works on view at Pace, some of which have never been exhibited before, trace Kngwarray’s rapid stylistic and thematic evolution, illuminating the inseparable interior and exterior worlds that shaped her practice. Harmony of Spring (1990), included in the exhibition, exemplifies the immediate confidence of her early paintings, marked by linear compositions overlaid with fields of singular and concentric double dots. In this work, and others from the same period, the underlying structure recalls the rhizomatic paths of the anwelarr yam and its seed-bearing flowers—kam—from which Kngwarray takes her middle name. Nested within the dense interplay of lines and dots are arrow-like forms depicting the tracks left across the ground by emus. These paintings can be read as experiential maps, charting time—seasonal shifts and the life cycles of plants and animals—and space, encompassing the vast terrain of Alhalker and the networks of roots and foliage above and below the earth’s surface. Kngwarray’s paintings not only make her relationship with this living world tangible, but extend its presence, drawing work, viewer, and artist into an ongoing expression of cultural and ecological responsibility.

Between 1992 and 1993, Kngwarray’s paintings surge with stippled fields of dots that engulf the linear foundations of her earlier works. Her use of color is denser, structuring the compositions through vibrant, often unexpected flashes of contrast and harmony—as seen in Desert Storm (1992), included in the exhibition, where an effervescent patch of mossy greens and earthy reds rolls off the right edge of the canvas, returning to the meteorological energy it describes. Kngwarray’s shifting use of tools and techniques is evident throughout this transformative period: larger canvas stretchers and longer brushes allowed for an expanded gestural range, while trimmed brushes enabled her to manipulate the texture of each daub.

As a senior member of her community, Kngwarray played a central role in awely— women’s ceremonial traditions encompassing song, dance, and the painting of bodies with ground ochres. Often painting her canvases while seated, her mark-making is defined by a fluid expressiveness and an ease with materials that echoes the ritual movement and touch of ‘painting up’ for awely. The striped designs of these ceremonies translated into the astonishing, austere canvases of her final years. These works—often composed of minimal, webbed structures painted over dark backgrounds—combine an assured command of linear form and the picture plane with the gestural force that defines all of Kngwarray’s work, from paintings and batiks to the ancestral, familial contact of ochre onto skin.

Alongside a 1987 batik by Kngwarray, this exhibition will also include textile works by Judy Greenie Ngwarai, Audrey Morton Ngwarai, Ruby Morton Ngwarai, Annie Petyarre, Lena Pula Pwerle, and an unknown artist. Together, these works demonstrate the enduring influence Kngwarray continues to have on generations of artists working in Australia today.