Pace will present The turning season, its first exhibition of work by Emily Kam Kngwarray in New York, from May 15 to August 14. On view at the gallery’s 508 and 510 West 25th Street spaces, this survey of the artist’s career will feature her most renowned series of paintings and textiles. Pace’s presentation, organized in collaboration with D Lan Galleries, follows a landmark retrospective of Kngwarray’s work at London’s Tate Modern in 2025.

Kngwarray (ca. 1914–1996) was born in Alhalker, 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 Dreaming: 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, and she made unique experimentations and developed her own personal style in the medium.