Emily Kame Kngwarreye
(Emily Kam Kngwarray)
Born: c. 1910–1996
Language: Anmatyerr
Region: Alhalker, Utopia, NT
At the center of Art Leven’s Sydney Contemporary 2026 presentation at Booth C10 is a significant early painting by Emily Kame Kngwarreye (Emily Kam Kngwarray), Ankara Merne – Intekwe, 1990. Exhibited in the artist’s first solo exhibition and held in the same private collection since its acquisition that year, the painting is presented alongside four works from 1994, offering a glimpse into the extraordinary evolution of Kngwarreye’s practice over just a few years.
Emily Kame Kngwarreye (Emily Kam Kngwarray) was a senior Anmatyerr artist from Alhalker in the Utopia region of Central Australia. After more than a decade working in batik, she began painting on canvas in the late 1980s. Over the following eight years, she produced an extraordinary body of work that established her as one of the most significant Australian artists of the twentieth century.
Her practice evolved at remarkable speed. Intricate dotted compositions gave way to increasingly expansive fields of colour, linear structures and, ultimately, the bold gestural paintings of her final years. Yet despite these dramatic stylistic shifts, the foundation of her work remained constant: a lifetime of cultural knowledge and an enduring connection to her Country.
Kngwarreye described the subject of her paintings as a “whole lot” — an all-encompassing expression of Country, Dreaming, ceremony, native plants, animals and the interconnected cycles of the natural world.
Ankara Merne – Intekwe, 1990
Painted in 1990, Ankara Merne-– Intekwe belongs to the formative period of Kngwarreye’s practice on canvas.
Across the surface, accumulations of dots form a dense and shifting composition, creating movement, rhythm and depth. The work reflects the visual language of Kngwarreye’s early paintings, before the extraordinary stylistic transformations that would characterise the years that followed.
Its history makes the painting particularly significant. Ankara Merne-– Intekwe was included in Emily Kame Kngwarreye’s first solo exhibition in 1990 and was acquired at that time by its current owner, remaining in the same private collection for more than three decades.
My Country, 1994
Alongside this important early painting, Art Leven is presenting four works from 1994, allowing visitors to see how dramatically Kngwarreye’s painting had developed in the intervening years.
The larger Alalgura (My Country), 1994, measuring 151.5 × 91 cm, is joined by three intimate works, Untitled (My Country 1), Untitled (My Country 2) and Untitled (My Country 3), each measuring just 38.5 × 31 cm.
Together, these works provide another perspective on Kngwarreye’s relationship with Country. Rather than understanding her changing styles as separate periods, they can be seen as different ways of expressing the same interconnected cultural and ecological world.
The contrast in scale is particularly compelling. Alalgura (My Country) has a larger physical presence, while the three small paintings bring Kngwarreye’s mark-making into a concentrated, intimate format. Seen together, they demonstrate how readily her visual language could move between different scales without losing its intensity.
Bringing the 1990 and 1994 works together also offers an opportunity to consider the extraordinary pace at which Kngwarreye’s practice evolved. In only a matter of years, she was continually rethinking colour, mark, composition and scale, while remaining grounded in Alhalker and the cultural knowledge that underpinned her entire practice.
The five paintings featured at Sydney Contemporary offer only a small window into Kngwarreye’s vast body of work, but together they reveal something fundamental about her practice: its capacity for constant transformation while remaining deeply and consistently connected to Country.
