D Lan Galleries Spotlights Two Powerhouses of Australian Indigenous Painting, From Emily Kam Kngwarray to Sally Gabori
A single canvas can hold a whole season, a whole ceremony, a whole geography of memory. That premise sits quietly behind a new presentation from D Lan Galleries, which brings together works by two of the most consequential Australian Indigenous artists to reach international audiences in recent years: Emily Kam Kngwarray (Australian, ca. 1914–1996) and Mirdidingkingathi Juwarnda Sally Gabori (Australian, ca. 1924–2015).
Among the key works on view is Kngwarray’s 1995 painting “Untitled – Winter Awelye,” a late-career work that underscores why she is widely regarded as one of Australia’s most celebrated artists. The gallery points to the painting as a highlight of the presentation, positioning it within the broader arc of Kngwarray’s growing global profile, which has been reinforced by a major retrospective in the recent past.
Kngwarray’s paintings are often discussed for their ability to translate cultural knowledge into a visual language that reads as both intimate and expansive. In “Untitled – Winter Awelye,” the title signals the ceremonial and seasonal dimensions that structure the work’s internal logic, even as the surface can register, to uninitiated eyes, as a field of rhythm and mark-making.
The presentation also features a bold, gestural work by Gabori, whose biography has become inseparable from the urgency and clarity of her painting. Gabori began painting at 81, an astonishingly late start that did not prevent her from developing a distinctive, confident approach. She belonged to the final generation of Kaiadilt people to live in a traditional way before the community was forcibly displaced in 1948, a rupture that continues to shape how her work is understood.
Gabori’s paintings are frequently described as carrying an ancestral connection to landscape, but their power lies in how they refuse to sit neatly in a single tense. The gallery frames her style as one that holds ancient and contemporary sensibilities at once, with gesture functioning less as expressionism than as a form of mapping: a way of returning, insistently, to place.
Both artists have been the focus of heightened international attention through major presentations of their work. The gallery notes recent global recognition for Kngwarray and Gabori, citing institutional contexts including the Fondation Cartier. The presentation also nods to the broader field of Australian Indigenous art by referencing Australian artist Gordon Bennett (Australian, 1955–2014), whose work has likewise played a significant role in shaping international conversations around First Nations histories and representation.
As D Lan Galleries frames it, the aim is not simply to reintroduce established names, but to widen the lens: to bring new and returning audiences into contact with a range of Australian Indigenous art and to encourage ongoing international dialogue around some of the most significant First Nations artists. In a market and museum landscape that can still flatten Indigenous practices into a single category, the pairing of Kngwarray and Gabori insists on specificity — of community, of history, of visual language — and on the fact that these paintings are not only seen, but read.
