Emily Kam Kngwarray: Tate Modern
- Catherine Flutsch
- Oct 31
- 2 min read
★★★★★
Exhibition Review: Emily Kam Kngwarray, Tate Modern, Open until 11 January 2026. Book tickets here.
In my view, the Tate Modern’s exhibition of Emily Kam Kngwarray is among the most significant, moving and beautiful shows the gallery has presented in the last decade. It stands as a compelling example of what can be achieved when all parties engage from a spirit of genuine collaboration and mutual respect.
Born in the Alhalker Country in Central Australia, Kngwarray (c. 1910–1996) was a member of the Anmatyerr people and is widely recognised as one of the most important Australian artists of the twentieth century.
Remarkably, she commenced her canvas-painting career in her mid-seventies after working with batik designs; in the short span that followed she produced an enormous body of work.
Kngwarray’s work unites a modern visual language with a profound connection to her ancestral land, its stories, and its plants and animals. The exhibition traces her development from the early batik works of the 1970s to the monumental canvases of the 1990s.
Certain motifs appear throughout Kngwarray’s work: the leaves and vines of the pencil yam, its seeds, the emu, the shimmer of water on rock, and the contours of the land itself. A section of the exhibition includes photographs of Kngwarray’s Alhalker Country, and these images make the relationships between place and painting immediately clear.
One gallery room features a short film made during a visit by curators to Kngwarray’s homeland in Alhalkere and the wider Anmatyerr region. It offers a moving, accessible introduction to the cultural framework within which Kngwarray worked.
While this cultural context enriches the exhibition, the work stands entirely on its own. The power and beauty are immediate: many works seem to move and change as you move around them. The scale, colour, and rhythmic brushwork make clear that this is painting of the highest order — confident, immersive, and alive.
Art critics and commentators have occasionally found Kngwarray’s work difficult to place within the standard narrative of twentieth-century art, in part because it originates in the desert, in an Indigenous context.
This exhibition, however, isn’t simply a retrospective of an Indigenous desert artist, or even one of Australia’s greatest painters - it is a major institutional recognition of one of the most audacious, profound and beautiful painters of the modern era.
Feature image Emily Kam Kngwarray Winter Abstraction 1993. Collection Bérengère Primat, Courtesy Foundation Opale, Switzerland © Emily Kam Kngwarray/Copyright Agency. Licensed by DACS 2025. Other than the feature image, all photographs taken by me at the exhibition.
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