Emily Kam Kngwarray at Tate Modern: A Dazzling Journey Through Country and Culture

Emily Kam Kngwarray installation view at Tate Modern 2025. © Emily Kam Kngwarray Copyright Agency. Licensed

Tate Modern is currently hosting one of the most important exhibitions of the year — and one that you cannot miss. For the first time in Europe, the full career of Emily Kam Kngwarray, a groundbreaking Aboriginal Australian artist, is being celebrated in a breathtaking retrospective. Her work, at once deeply spiritual and strikingly modern, fills the galleries with stories, movement, and colour.

© Toly Sawenko

Born around 1914 in the remote region of Alhalker in Australia’s Northern Territory, Kngwarray didn’t begin painting until she was in her 70s. But in less than two decades, she created an extraordinary body of work that changed the course of contemporary art. Her paintings and textiles are more than visual compositions — they’re a way of honouring her land, her culture, and her community. They speak of ancestral memory, ceremony, and the natural rhythms of the desert.

Organised in partnership with the National Gallery of Australia, the exhibition features more than 80 works spanning Kngwarray’s career. Most of these have never been seen outside Australia, offering a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to witness the evolution of her practice. The show opens with pieces from Tate’s collection, alongside early batiks and her very first canvas work, Emu Woman (1988–89), a pivotal piece that first caught national attention in Australia and has now arrived in London on loan.

Emily Kam Kngwarray, Untitled, 1995, Helen Eager and Christopher Hodges. Installation view at Tate Modern 2025. © Emily Kam Kngwarray Copyright Agency. Licensed by DACS 2025. Photo © Tate

Each artwork on display is rooted in Kngwarray’s deep connection to her Country. She painted while sitting on the ground, just as she would when digging yams or preparing food, and she used dots, lines, and fluid movements to map out the stories of the land. Her visual language draws on plants, animals, and ceremonial patterns — the kind women would paint on each other’s bodies before performing awely, a traditional ceremony that weaves together dance, song, and earth.

As visitors move through the exhibition, the journey becomes increasingly immersive. Massive batiks hang from ceilingto the floor. Monumental canvases burst with colour and energy. Dreaming stories take shape in swirls of paint — paths traced by emus, seeds scattered by wind, and flowers blooming after the rains.

© Emily Kam Kngwarray/Copyright Agency

This exhibition is more than an homage to a brilliant artist. It’s a rare and vital opportunity to experience a perspective that often goes unseen in the European art world. Kngwarray’s work doesn’t just speak — it sings, dances, and breathes. Her legacy continues to inspire new generations of artists, and her voice remains as powerful as ever.

If you’re in London, this is something you must experience in person. Give yourself time. Let the colours sink in. Let the stories guide you. You’ll walk away not just having seen art — but having felt One of the most powerful moments of the show is the presentation of The Alhalker Suite (1993), a collection of 22 paintings that form a vivid portrait of her ancestral land. In this masterpiece, we see Kngwarray’s colour palette expand to include soft pinks and electric blues, capturing the changing seasons of the desert. The suite has no fixed arrangement, allowing curators to reimagine it each time it is exhibited — a poetic reflection of the living stories it represents.

Toward the end of her life, Kngwarray made a dramatic shift in style. Her late works move away from the dot technique, embracing bold, sweeping lines painted in vibrant reds and yellows. These works feel raw and intimate, echoing the sensation of painting directly onto skin for ceremony. One of the final works in the show, Yam Awely (1995), is a luminous tangle of roots, grasses, and earth that seems to pulse with the energy of the land itself.it.

Emily Kam Kngwarray is now on view at Tate Modern.