Emily Kam Kngwarray

Kngwarray (ca. 1914–1996) was born in Alhalker, located in the Sandover region of the Northern Territory, Australia. An Elder of the Anmatyerr people and custodian of Alhalker, she produced vivid, deeply personal works that express the ancestral and ecological relationships that shape her land. 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 with the past, present, and future. Her paintings do more than depict these forces—they embody them, giving visual form to the rhythms and energies of her Country. For Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, the term Country extends beyond the land to encompass waters, skies, and all living beings, as well as the cultural, spiritual, and familial responsibilities that connect them.

The artist began to paint on canvas in the late 1980s, when she was in her 70s. The most enduring source of inspiration for her abstractions was the rhizomatic paths of the anwerlarr yam—the pencil yam—and its life below and above ground. A sprawling vine with bright green leaves and yellow flowers, the pencil yam has skinny roots that stretch underground, causing cracks at the surface during harvest times. The pencil yam’s seeds and seedpods—kam—give Kngwarray her middle name. She represented these in her paintings overlaid with fields of singular and concentric double dots, which she created in a highly physical, choreographic process. As she aged, Kngwarray instead focused her formal explorations on lyrical linear forms. Up until the last week of her life, she maintained a prolific practice, producing some 3,000 paintings on canvas between the late 1980s and her death in 1996.

Across all her compositions, intricate layers of forms speak to a lifetime of kinship with the seasons and life cycles of plants and animals of her Country. The colors she used are deeply connected to the times in which they were produced—subdued tones during dry periods and bright, vivid hues after rain. Kngwarray’s paintings are not only reflections of her relationship to the living world, but also expressions of cultural and ecological responsibility that transcend time and place.

This exhibition will bring together paintings Kngwarray created between 1981 and 1995, including two of her batik works from 1981 and 1987. The show will also feature textile works by Judy Greenie Ngwarai, Audrey Morton Ngwarai, and Ruby Morton Ngwarai, all of whom produced batiks alongside Kngwarray in the Utopia community in the 1970s and 1980s.

Kngwarray’s shifting use of tools and techniques is evident in works from the 1990s, a transformative decade in which larger canvas stretchers and longer brushes allowed for an expanded gestural range, while trimmed brushes enabled her to more deftly manipulate the texture of each daub of paint. Among the highlights from this period in Pace’s exhibition are Alalgura I (1990), in which sinuous yam-tracking lines that map the underground root system of Alhalker are just legible beneath a dense field of overlaid dots; Untitled (Dry Winter Yam Story) (1992), a vast canvas measuring nearly five meters long that reflects two geographically and ecologically distinct sites of Alhalker Country, connected by the pinks, mauves, and golds in the flora of both locations; and Desert at Dawn (1994), where delicate, loose, rhythmic dots rendered in washed pink and soft gold represent the soft quality of light in Alhalker in the weeks after the wet season, before the dry fully asserts itself. The presentation will also include Body Markings (Sorry Cuts) (1994), a work on paper that was shown in the Tate Modern retrospective last year.

The works in this exhibition reflect Kngwarray’s experimentations with dense, seemingly disparate colors. Both protecting and sharing her Country through her work, the artist harnessed the power and poetry of abstraction to forge maps of history and experience, time and space, that continue to resonate today.

Kngwarray’s work can be found in numerous collections around the world, including the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra; the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne; the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney; the Museum of Modern Art in New York; the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.; Glenstone Museum in Potomac, Maryland; Tate in London; and the Sehwa Museum of Art in Seoul.