Emily Kam Kngwarray at Tate Modern
It’s hard not to feel your eyes recalibrating the moment you step into Emily Kam Kngwarray at Tate Modern. The galleries are strikingly spare: white walls, generous space and few distractions. It’s a deliberate staging that serves Kngwarray’s work perfectly, letting individual pieces breathe and allowing the searing hues and intricate gestures of her art to emerge at the forefront. Nowhere is this more powerful than in the arrangement of Kngwarray’s early batiks, many of which are freestanding in the centre of the rooms rather than confined to walls. The fluid silk batiks – created between 1980 and 1988 – are draped and flowing, evoking not just images but something close to a living presence.
Untitled (1981), a smaller batik in brilliant reds on silk, where native insects, reptiles, and emus appear in bold white strokes. The emus, sketched in vigorous lines, seem to strut across the fabric, hinting at Kngwarray’s lifelong engagement with the creatures and stories of her country. These motifs echo into the next rooms, where Alhalker – Old Man Emu with Babies (1989) appears rendered in her now-famous language of dense dotting. Here, the same assured lines are reborn in acrylic, with delicate whites evoking the fading feathers of ageing birds under the harsh Northern Territory sun.
One of the most striking aspects of the exhibition is how it draws attention to the very concept of time, unveiling the astonishing breadth and depth of Kngwarray’s artistic vision – all realised within less than two decades. While many artists develop gradually over a lifetime, her artistic “chapters” blazed through just a few short years. Beginning in the late 1970s with batik, it was her pivotal transition to acrylic painting in 1988 that propelled her into the spotlight, sparking a brief yet extraordinary burst of creativity that continued until her passing in 1996. Above all, colour emerges as her language of revelation. From the smouldering reds to the subdued ochres, her palette feels as if it is drawn directly from the desert itself – alive, uncompromising, and steeped in a profound sense of place. Now, this fierce spirit breathes boldly within the walls of the Tate Modern.
Christina Yang
Photo: Emily Kam Kngwarray Winter Abstraction 1993. Collection Bérengère Primat, Courtesy Foundation Opale, Switzerland © Emily Kam Kngwarray/Copyright Agency. Licensed by DACS 2025
Emily Kam Kngwarray is at from 10th July 2025 until 11th January 2026. For further information or to book, visit the exhibition’s website here.
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