Tate Modern showed eighty works by Emily Kam Kngwarray together in Europe for the first time, made in her late seventies and eighties in the Utopia homelands.
Tate Modern gathered eighty works by the Aboriginal Australian artist Emily Kam Kngwarray for an exhibition that ran from Thursday 10 July 2025 to Sunday 11 January 2026.
Kngwarray was born around 1910 at Alhalkere, in the Utopia homelands of Australia’s Northern Territory, about 250 kilometres north-east of Alice Springs. She began working in batik in 1977 and took up painting on canvas in 1988, in her late seventies, then painted intensely for the eight years until her death in 1996. Vast canvases and vibrant early batiks made her name in the late 1980s, and her work represented Australia at the Venice Biennale in 1997.
She also made etchings and linocuts in the early 1990s, and never left her community despite national fame in her lifetime. Her paintings layer motifs for the vines, seeds, lizards and emus of the desert ecosystems around her, and they carry stories and knowledge held over generations.
The exhibition showed the eighty works together in Europe for the first time, with film and audio telling her story. Tate Modern and the National Gallery of Australia organised it, based on a show curated by Kelli Cole, of the Warumungu and Luritja peoples, and Hetti Perkins, of the Arrernte and Kalkadoon peoples. Kelli Cole curated the London presentation, with research supported by the Hyundai Tate Research Centre: Transnational.