NEW YORK, NY.- A major survey exhibition of works by Australia’s most significant contemporary abstract painter, Emily Kame Kngwarreye, is being shown in the United States for the first time. EMILY brings together seventeen of the finest examples from the artist’s entire oeuvre – from beginning to end.

Kngwarreye has long been one of Australia’s most celebrated and sought-after contemporary artists. She emerged into public view in 1988 when she began painting on canvas at the age of 78 – drawing on a lifetime of ritual and artistic activity in the remote desert community known as Utopia, located to the north east of Alice Springs in the heart of Central Australia.

Her energetic paintings are infused with the stories and the spiritual forces of her country – as a senior member of the Anmatyerre clan and a custodian of the Dreaming sites of Alhalkere where she was born, Kngwarreye had only sporadic contact with the outside world for most of her life.

In the course of her eight-year painting career, Kngwarreye’s output was prodigious, with an estimated 3,000 works created – most while sitting on the ground under the shade of a tree, dipping brushes into discarded food tins filled with paint. Her paints and materials were predominantly supplied by community advocate Rodney Gooch at CAAMA, and then by pastoralists Janet and Donald Holt at Delmore Downs.

Since her death in 1996 at the age of 86, Kngwarreye has become recognized as one of the most successful artists to come out of Australia, achieving worldwide acclaim with exhibitions across Europe, UK, Asia and the US, and most recently as part of Steve Martin’s Australian Indigenous art collection exhibited at Gagosian in New York and Los Angeles.

Curated by D’Lan Davidson, the leading Australian Indigenous art specialist, the seventeen works selected for EMILY demonstrate how widely the artist’s oeuvre varied in style – moving from a profusion of fine dots to elegant black lines to raw slashed stripes in dramatic tones.

The exhibition includes an important monumental early canvas, My Country, that has not been seen in public since its creation in 1990. The major work, measuring 5 by 8 feet, is the artist’s first work painted for Delmore Gallery in large scale – there were only 8 works of this grand scale created for Delmore.

Davidson remarks, “Faced with incomparable hardships in life, Emily has triumphed through her art. It’s time the New York audience saw what this incredible artist was capable of. We could not have brought a stronger force from the Australian Indigenous art movement than Emily.” He continues, “Her works are lyrical and encoded with tradition. They form important passages of time, which remain a moving and continual gift left by the artist, not only to her people, but to us all.”