Emily Kam Kngwarray: The Turning Season
15 May – 14 August 2026
508 & 510 West 25th Street, New York

Emily Kam Kngwarray, Mern Anwelarr 1992 © Emily Kam Kngwarray/Copyright Agency. Licensed by Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, 2026

New York/Lenapehoking – D Lan Galleries, in collaboration with Pace gallery, is pleased to present Emily Kam Kngwarray: The Turning Season, a major survey of one of Australia’s most significant artists, on view in New York from 15 May to 14 August 2026. Spanning Pace’s Chelsea spaces at 508 and 510 West 25th Street, the exhibition brings together for the first time at Pace New York, key works across Kngwarray’s career, including her celebrated painting series and early batik textiles.

This presentation marks a second international collaboration between D Lan Galleries and Pace gallery, building on a shared commitment to advancing the global recognition of Australian First Nations art. It follows the landmark 2025 retrospective of Kngwarray’s work at Tate Modern, London, and D Lan Galleries and Pace’s 2025 London exhibition, Emily Kam Kngwarray: My Country, reflecting growing international recognition and demand for historically significant works by preeminent Australian First Nations artists.

“Emily Kam Kngwarray is one of the most important artists of the 20th century, and her work continues to resonate with audiences globally,” said D’Lan Davidson, Founder of D Lan Galleries. “Our collaboration with Pace gallery reflects a shared commitment to presenting her work with cultural integrity, scholarship and the global reach it demands. It is also part of a broader effort to ensure that Australian First Nations art is understood internationally not as a regional category, but as central to global art history.”

Kngwarray (ca. 1914–1996) was born in Alhalker Country, located in the Sandover region of the Northern Territory, Australia. An Elder of the Anmatyerr people and custodian of Alhalker, she produced vivid, deeply personal works that express the ancestral and ecological relationships that shape her land. Kngwarray’s practice was rooted in the Anmatyerr system of Altyerr: a dynamic, lived worldview in which ancestral creation stories and laws animate the land, its people, and their connections with the past, present, and future. Her paintings do more than depict these forces; they embody them, giving visual form to the rhythms and energies of her  Country. For Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, the term Country extends beyond the land to encompass waters, skies, and all living beings, as well as the cultural, spiritual, and familial responsibilities that connect them. 

One of Australia’s most celebrated artists, Kngwarray first worked in batik, an Indonesian textile dyeing technique introduced to a group of Alyawarr and Anmatyerr women from the Utopia region in the Northern Territory in 1977. Kngwarray was an original member of the Utopia Women’s Batik Group. She made unique experimentations and developed her own personal style in the medium.  

Kngwarray began to paint on canvas in the late 1980s, when she was in her 70s. The most enduring source of inspiration for her abstractions was the rhizomatic paths of the anwerlarr yam—the pencil yam—and its life below and above ground. A sprawling vine with bright green leaves and yellow flowers, the pencil yam has skinny roots that stretch underground, causing cracks at the surface during harvest times. The pencil yams’ seeds and seedpods —kam—give Kngwarray her middle name. She represented these in her paintings overlaid with fields of singular and concentric double dots, which she created in a highly physical,  choreographic process. As she aged, Kngwarray instead focused her formal explorations on lyrical linear forms. Up until the last week of her life, she maintained a prolific practice, producing some 3,000 paintings on canvas between the late 1980s and her death in 1996. 

Across all her compositions, intricate layers of forms speak to a lifetime of kinship with the seasons and life cycles of plants and animals of her Country. The colours she used are deeply connected to the times in which they were produced—subdued tones during dry periods and bright, vivid hues after rain. Kngwarray’s paintings are not only reflections of her relationship to the living world, but also expressions of cultural and ecological responsibility that transcend time and place. 

This exhibition will bring together paintings Kngwarray created between 1981 and 1995, including two of her batik works from  1981 and 1987. The show will also feature textile works by Judy Kngwarray Greenie, Audrey Kngwarray Morton, and Ruby Kngwarray Morton, all of whom produced batiks alongside Kngwarray in the Utopia community in the 1970s and 1980s.  

Kngwarray’s shifting use of tools and techniques is evident in works from the 1990s, a transformative decade in which larger canvas stretchers and longer brushes allowed for an expanded gestural range, while trimmed brushes enabled her to more deftly manipulate the texture of each daub of paint. Among the highlights from this period in Pace’s exhibition are Alalgura I (1990), in which sinuous yam-tracking lines that map the underground root system of Alhalker are just legible beneath a dense field of overlaid dots; Untitled (Dry Winter Yam Story) (1992), a vast canvas measuring nearly five meters long that reflects two geographically and ecologically distinct sites of Alhalker Country, connected by the pinks, mauves, and golds in the flora of both locations; and Desert at Dawn (1994), where delicate, loose, rhythmic dots rendered in washed pink and soft gold represent the soft quality of light in Alhalker in the weeks after the wet season, before the dry season fully asserts itself. The presentation will also include Body Markings (Sorry Cuts) (1994), a work on paper that was shown in the Tate Modern retrospective last year. 

The works in this exhibition reflect Kngwarray’s experimentations with dense, seemingly disparate colors. Both protecting and sharing her Country through her work, the artist harnessed the power and poetry of abstraction to forge maps of history and experience, time and space, that continue to resonate today.  

Kngwarray’s work can be found in numerous collections around the world, including the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra; the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne; the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; Glenstone Museum, Potomac, Maryland; Tate, London; and the Sehwa  Museum of Art, Seoul. 

Download PDF Catalogue here.

ENDS

Australian Media Enquiries, Image and Interview Requests:
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About Emily Kam Kngwarray

Emily Kam Kngwarray (b. ca. 1914, Alhalker, Utopia, Australia; d. 1996, Mparntwe/Alice Springs, Australia) began painting on silk and cotton fabric in the batik style alongside the women in her community, and, in 1977, became a founding member of the Utopia Women’s Batik Group. Introduced to canvas in 1988, Kngwarray’s practice shifted in part due to the adaptability of paint as a medium, which allowed her to create spontaneous, gestural marks using various implements. Kngwarray’s paintings are a continuation of the deep-rooted oral and visual traditions that inspired her batik work. When she was already in her seventies,  her first painting, Emu Woman (1988–1989), debuted in the group exhibition, A Summer Project: Utopia Women’s Paintings held at S.H. Ervin Gallery, Sydney (1989).  

Kngwarray was a prolific artist, executing an estimated three thousand paintings in an eight-year span. In 1997, she was represented posthumously at the 47th Venice Biennale. Her work is held in public collections worldwide including Araluen Arts Centre, Alice Springs, Australia; Lowe Art Museum, University of Miami, Coral Gables, Florida; Museum of Contemporary Art  Australia, Sydney; National Gallery of Australia, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne; and The Vatican Museums, Vatican  City, among many others. In July 2025, Tate Modern, London, opened the first major survey of Kngwarray’s work in Europe. 

About D Lan Galleries
D LAN GALLERIES was founded in Melbourne, Australia in 2016 by leading art consultant, dealer and gallerist, D’Lan Davidson, who was previously Head of Indigenous Art at Sotheby’s Australia, and who has specialized in Australian First Nations art for over twenty years.

D LAN GALLERIES presents exceptional work of art by leading and emerging First Nations artists at its galleries in Melbourne, Sydney, and New York, at international art fairs and in partnership with other venues and galleries around the world.

Alongside an international exhibition program, the gallery also presents educational talks and events that celebrate and promote the rich art and culture of Australia’s first peoples.

D LAN GALLERIES maintains strict ethical practices and is committed to fostering a sustainable marketplace for this important segment of Australian art and culture. The gallery contributes 30% of its net profits back to First Nations artists, artist projects and their communities.

D Lan Galleries acknowledges the Traditional Owners and Custodians of the lands on which we work – the Wurundjeri Woi-wurrung, Bunurong and Boonwurrung peoples of the Kulin Nations in Naarm/Melbourne, the Birrabirragal and Gadigal peoples of the Eora Nation in Gadigal/Sydney, and the Lenape people of Lenapehoking, the ancestral lands that now form New York City.

About Pace
Pace is a leading international art gallery representing some of the most influential artists and estates of the 20th and 21st centuries, founded by Arne Glimcher in 1960. Holding decades-long relationships with Alexander Calder, Jean Dubuffet, Agnes Martin, Louise Nevelson, and Mark Rothko, Pace has a unique story that can be traced to its early support of artists central to the Abstract Expressionist, Minimalist, Pop, and Light and Space movements. Now in its seventh decade, the gallery maintains enduring ties with its legacy artists and estates while also making long-term investments in the careers of contemporary artists, including rising painters Pam Evelyn, Li Hei Di, and Lauren Quin as well as established figures such as Loie Hollowell, Kylie Manning, Robert Nava, Adam Pendleton, Marina Perez Simão, and Anicka Yi. Under the current leadership of CEO Marc Glimcher and President Samanthe Rubell, Pace has established itself as a gallery of and for the future. It has played a key role in shaping and building major public and private collections across the globe since its founding. Pace highlights the shared lineages among its intergenerational artists through a robust global exhibition program encompassing 20th-century masterworks and contemporary art, as well as scholarly projects from Pace Publishing, one of the longest standing gallery imprints. Its artist-first ethos extends to public installations, philanthropic events, performances, and other interdisciplinary programming.

Pace also has a strong reputation for collaboration, and it shares representation of some artists with various small and midsize galleries around the world. In 2025, in this spirit of community, Pace became a partner in Pace Di Donna Schrader, a boutique gallery devoted to secondary market sales operating on a global scale. Pace continues its long history of collection-building with this venture, which charts a new path for its work in the secondary market and its stewardship of historic artworks.

Today, Pace has nine locations worldwide, including two galleries in New York—its eight-story headquarters at 540 West 25th Street and an adjacent 8,000-square-foot exhibition space at 510 West 25th Street in Chelsea—and 125 Newbury, an experimental project space in Tribeca named for the gallery’s original address on Newbury Street in Boston. Through an exhibition program directed by Arne Glimcher, 125 Newbury mounts innovative shows by emerging artists as well as curated presentations focusing on specific aspects or periods of historical artists’ practices. Pace’s origin in New York dates to 1963, when it opened its first space in the city on East 57th Street. Pace has also been active in California for some 60 years, opening its West Coast flagship in Los Angeles in 2022. It maintains European footholds in London, Geneva, and Berlin, where it established a gallery space in 2025. Pace was one of the first international galleries to have a major presence in Asia, where it has been active since 2008, the year it first opened in Beijing’s vibrant 798 Art District. It now operates galleries in Seoul and Tokyo along with offices in Beijing and Hong Kong.