Emily Kam Kngwarray: A Desert Visionary Arrives at Tate Modern

One of Australia's greatest artists only began painting on canvas in her late seventies — and changed the course of contemporary art. In 2025 Tate Modern staged the first major UK exhibition of Emily Kam Kngwarray, the Anmatyerr elder from the remote community of Alhalkere in Australia's Northern Territory.

Her huge, shimmering fields of dots and sweeping lines map her ancestral Country, its plants, seeds and Dreaming stories — abstract to Western eyes, but for the artist a precise record of land, law and belonging.

Organised with the National Gallery of Australia, the show introduced British audiences to a body of work of astonishing energy, made in a brief, blazing final decade of life.

Image: “CSIRO ScienceImage 4247 Ayers RockUluru in central Australian desert Northern Territory 1992” — John Coppi, CSIRO, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.