Nearly thirty years after her death in 1996, the celebrated Anmatyerr artist Emily Kam Kngwarray is having her moment in Europe’s largest art capital. In conjunction with the National Gallery of Australia (NGA), Tate Modern has mounted a grand survey of over eighty works, from the earliest batiks in the 1970s to the great paintings from the mid-1990s. My question, when I attended the exhibition in London: how is this vibrant art understood there? Apart from sporadic showings in group exhibitions – notably, the Royal Academy’s 2013 exhibition Australia, which included the extraordinary Big yam Dreaming (1995), on loan from the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV) – Kngwarray’s work has not been the subject of a major solo exhibition. This is London’s chance to take the measure of one of Australia’s greatest painters.

The exhibition was first seen at the NGA over the summer of 2023-24, so what was different at Tate? At Tate, the curators requested additional contextual material – such as photographs and a soundtrack of an Anmatyerr women’s singing ceremony – while the inclusion of works from European collections alleviated freight costs. While some key works from Australia were omitted, the European additions highlighted that continent’s changing perceptions of Indigenous art. Critic Anny Shaw, writing in The Standard this July, noted that more attention is being paid to Indigenous artists in Europe. A small but persistent cohort in Europe has been collecting the works of Australian Aboriginal artists for decades; loans from the Essl Collection, now held in the Albertina Museum in Vienna, and from Bérengère Primat’s Fondation Opale, in Switzerland, indicate longstanding interest in Emily’s work.