Emily Kam Kngwarray

My Country

On View
Jun 6 – Aug 8, 2025
London

Pace is honored to present an exhibition of works by renowned Australian artist Emily Kam Kngwarray, in collaboration with D’Lan Contemporary, at its London gallery this summer. The show—titled My Country—opens on June 6 and runs through August 8, coinciding with Tate Modern’s major survey of the artist, which will open in July.

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 broader Australian art landscape, 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 was introduced to 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.

An Elder of the Anmatyerr people and custodian of her ancestral Country, Alhalker, Kngwarray produced vivid, deeply personal works that express the ancestral and ecological relationships that continue to shape her land. For Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, the term Country encompasses not only the physical terrain but also waters, skies, and all living beings, together with the cultural, spiritual, and familial responsibilities that connect them. Kngwarray’s practice was rooted in the Dreaming: a dynamic, lived worldview in which ancestral creation stories and laws animate the land, its people, and their connections. Her paintings do more than depict these forces; they embody them, giving visual form to the rhythms and energies of her Country.

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, as in others from the same period, the underlying structure recalls the rhizomatic paths of the anwerlarr yam, along with its seed and seedpods—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, and Lena Pula Pwerle. Together, these works demonstrate the enduring influence Kngwarray continues to have on generations of artists working in Australia today.

Alhalker Country is ours—so is the anwerlarr yam. I paint my plant, the one I am named after—those seeds I am named after. Kam is its name. Kam. I am named after the anwerlarr plant. I am Kam!

Emily Kam Kngwarray quoted in Jennifer Green, “The life and legacy of Emily Kam Kngwarray” in Emily Kam Kngwarray, ed. Kelli Cole, Jennifer Green, and Hetti Perkins (National Gallery of Australia, 2023), 150.

Films

A Constant Searching: Tracing Emily Kam Kngwarray's Visionary Practice

Vanessa Merlino, Head of Research at D’Lan Contemporary, offers insights into the ways that Kngwarray's works give visual form to the rhythms, energies, and traditions of her ancestral Country, Alhalker, in the Northern Territory of Australia. “With her work, it's not about a singular painting. It's about this journey, it's about this constant searching,” Merlino says.

Yam Roots by Emily Kam Kngwarray — Emily Kam Kngwarray, *Yam Roots*, 1995 © Emily Kam Kngwarray/Copyright Agency

Essays

Encountering Kngwarray

by Anne Brody

The twelve works by Emily Kam Kngwarray in My Country skip across the surface of the artist’s brilliant oeuvre like stones across a pond, suspended above the ripple of circumstance, art, and genius that shaped the artist’s career.

Thirty years on, and notwithstanding three major surveys, Kngwarray’s oeuvre remains largely unexamined in any great detail. In her case, a catalogue raisonné represents a challenging art historical project, an almost “too big” story. Unlike many artists who largely work sequentially with their commissioners, patrons, and gallerists, Kngwarray’s essential practice—particularly in the second half of her career—was to paint for more than one commissioner at the same time. As her career reached its halfway mark in 1992, the field of people wanting to obtain work from Kngwarray exponentially increased along with her ever-advancing popularity and the demand for her work.

Tracking sequences and the threads of process and practice is a routine aspect of mapping the works of any artist—until, in the case of Kngwarray, you find yourself amidst prodigious numbers and a highly-compressed chronology, both routinely, if vaguely, cited at around 3000 or more works in 8 years. Yet, nothing about Kngwarray’s oeuvre or its diverse commissioning origins is typical. Not only was she an original and energetic visual thinker, she also pioneered new ways of working freelance with commissioning agents—all without the support of an art center.

Untitled - Alhalker by Emily Kam Kngwarray

Harmony of Spring by Emily Kam Kngwarray

Untitled - Loatjira (goanna) by Lena Pula Pwerle

Pace Live

Emily Kam Kngwarray: A Conversation with Jennifer Higgie, Tamsin Hong, Amanda Thomson

On the occasion of Emily Kam Kngwarray: My Country, writer Jennifer Higgie, artist and writer Amanda Thomson, and curator Tamsin Hong came together for a conversation, moderated by Vanessa Merlino, on Emily Kam Kngwarray’s work and its resonances with contemporary approaches to land, embodiment, and women’s knowledge systems.

The twelve works by Emily Kam Kngwarray in My Country skip across the surface of the artist’s brilliant oeuvre like stones across a pond, suspended above the ripple of circumstance, art, and genius that shaped the artist’s career.

Anne Brody, Encountering Kngwarray

About the Artist

Emily Kam Kngwarray began painting on silk and cotton fabric in the batik style alongside the women in her community, and, in 1977, became a founding member of the Utopia Women’s Batik Group. Introduced to canvas in 1988, Kngwarray’s practice shifted in part due to the adaptability of paint as a medium, which allowed her to create spontaneous, gestural marks using various implements. Kngwarray’s paintings are a continuation of the deep-rooted oral and visual traditions that inspired her batik work.

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EXHIBITION DETAILS

Emily Kam Kngwarray
My Country
Jun 6 – Aug 8, 2025

Above: Installation view, Emily Kam Kngwarray: My Country, Jun 6 – Aug 8, 2025, Pace Gallery, London © Emily Kam Kngwarray/Copyright Agency

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Emily Kam Kngwarray

My Country

Films

A Constant Searching: Tracing Emily Kam Kngwarray's Visionary Practice

Essays

Encountering Kngwarray

Checklist

Pace Live

Emily Kam Kngwarray: A Conversation with Jennifer Higgie, Tamsin Hong, Amanda Thomson

About the Artist

EXHIBITION DETAILS

GALLERY

PRESS

CONNECT

Journal

James Turrell's Art of Opulence and Light

A Constant Searching: Tracing Emily Kam Kngwarray's Visionary Practice

Emily Kam Kngwarray: A Conversation with Jennifer Higgie, Tamsin Hong, Amanda Thomson

Tara Donovan on Material Transcendence