Emily Kam Kngwarreye

Renowned for her colourful and vibrant paintings based on the ever-changing desert landscape, Emily Kam Kngwarreye was deeply rooted in the Anmatyerr land of her ancestors, paying respect through a lifetime of devotion to women’s ceremony in song, dance and the ceremonial painting of bodies. Born around 1910, she lived in the ways of the eastern Anmatyerr at Alhalkere, her father and grandfather’s country.

In 1977, Kngwarreye was introduced to batik as part of adult education classes on Utopia Station. A decade later, in 1988-89, she painted her first work on canvas, sparking a meteoric rise to fame. Her mark-making revealed a strength and sureness of hand delivering an exuberance of gesture, with underlying grids, sequences of dots, meandering lines and builds of colour constituting her distinctive lexicon. In her final months at Delmore Downs Station, she produced powerful monochromatic canvases, masterpieces of strength and simplicity. Though her painting career lasted less than a decade before her death in 1996, Kngwarreye is now recognised internationally as one of the most important contemporary artists of the twentieth century.