Emily Kame Kngwarreye (1910 - 1996) is one of Australia’s most celebrated artists. She began her painting career in her late seventies, quickly gaining national and then, international renown. She emerged in the late 1980s as the first prominent female painter in what had until then been a male-dominated Aboriginal art movement. One of the last generations of First Nations Elders born and raised in a country devoid of impinging settler influence, Emily grew up acutely attuned to the land’s riches, its seasonality and her place within its cycles. Emily’s complete series is ritualistic repetition at its most refined. The artist’s various styles that emerged across her body of work reflect the deep understanding and experience of Alhalker: her physical and spiritual home, her only source of constant inspiration and point of connection. The number of stylistic transitions that Emily produced over a short eight-year period was inspired by Alhalker’s spiritual and environmental diversity. From the “field of dots” to the concluding brushstrokes in her last series, remarkable physical and spiritual strength flowed into her paintings. Her work on canvas moved through frequent stylistic shifts, expressing her depth of knowledge and ongoing experience of awely: women’s Dreaming ceremony. The anwerlarr (anooralya) yam from Alhalker is another principal motif of her ceremonial designs and the central theme of her œuvre. The skeletal structure of sinuous lines recalls the yam’s underground growth paths, and by association, the emu, which feeds on its flowers and seeds. The rhythmic thrust of

Emily’s brush on canvas invoked the subterranean life of the yam and is a vital component in communicating the vitality of its Dreaming.
Kngwarreye’s work belongs in the collections of Tate Gallery, London (UK); the Art Gallery of New South Wales Sydney (AU); The Museum of Contemporary Art Australia in Sydney (AU) and was exhibited at the Venice Biennale in 1997 and 2015 (IT). Her work will be the subject of a major solo exhibition opening in 2025 at Pace Gallery, London (UK), which will be followed by a retrospective at Tate Gallery, London (UK), organized in close collaboration with the National Gallery of Australia (NGA).