From posthumous acclaim for Emily Kam Kngwarray to Archie Moore’s Golden Lion award win, Indigenous Australian artists are capturing global attention with work that draws on millennia of cultural tradition while speaking to the present
—by Steve Dow.
01 Installation view of Royal Albert (2025) acrylic painting on linen by Vincent Namatjira. Image courtesy of NGA.
02 Installation view of a batik painting on silk (1988-1989) by Emily Kam Kngwarray at the Tate Modern in 2025.
Image: Kathleen Arundell.
The late Anmatyerr artist Emily Kam Kngwarray captivated the world with her batik prints and large acrylic paintings— produced from her remote desert home of Utopia, north-east of Alice Springs. She went on to represent Australia at the Venice Biennale (posthumously, alongside Yvonne Koolmatrie and Judy Watson), and her work continues to resonate globally, commanding an
eponymous solo blockbuster at Tate Modern in London, which ran from mid-2025 into early 2026.
Working with extraordinary intensity in the final years of her life, Kngwarray made upwards of 3000 canvases before her death in 1996, in her mid-80s. “If you close your eyes and imagine the paintings in your mind’s eye, you will see them move,” she said. “They are real.”
New global terrain
What is now dawning for audiences is a continuum of past, present and future—the “everywhen” foundational to such masterpieces. London critics celebrated Kngwarray’s oeuvre during the Tate retrospective, while across the Atlantic, the NGV’s touring exhibition The Stars We Do Not See represents a further landmark presentation. Featuring more than 200 works by over 130 artists, from Kngwarray to contemporary conceptual pieces using neon, photography and video, it has been billed as the largest exhibition of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander art ever seen in North America. Opening in Washington DC in late 2025, it is travelling to three further US states over the remainder of its 18-month run.
Indigenous Australian art is experiencing significant global recognition, as audiences come to understand the timeless knowledges and truth-telling embedded in such works— meanings that extend far beyond viewing it as purely abstract or decorative.
“I think there are a few things at play,” says Warumungu/Luritja curator Kelli Cole, who alongside Arrernte/Kalkadoon curator Hetti Perkins assembled the original major 2023-24 Kngwarray exhibition at the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra, upon which the Tate show is based. “Partly it’s our major cultural institutions really pushing First Nations art on to the international stage,” Cole suggests. “Commercial galleries are also reaching further afield showing at fairs like Frieze and Art Basel, and private collectors are really championing these artists.”
Comprehension of Kngwarray’s work at the Tate was enhanced by context, says Cole, including photographs by filmmaker Dylan River of the artist’s ancestral Country and Danielle MacLean’s portrait film Emily: I Am Kam. “Viewers often begin their engagement with [her] paintings through the familiar language of Western abstraction,” she says.
“Her bold, gestural canvases immediately call to mind modernist masters, leading to a purely formal reading of line and colour. Once visitors read the didactics and view the film, they realise her work stems not from Western tradition, but from Anmatyerr law, Country, ceremony and deep embodied knowledge,” Cole continues. Kngwarray’s work, she adds, “simultaneously disarms Western expectations and powerfully broadens the definition of First Nations art for a global audience.”
A golden moment
Indigenous art gained unprecedented global
recognition in 2024, when Kamilaroi/Bigambul artist Archie Moore won the Golden Lion for best national participation at the Venice Biennale, for
his installation kith and kin—the first time Australia had scored the high honour.
Moore’s sombre work in the Australian pavilion
was deeply affecting: his conceptual 65,000-year
genealogical chart painstakingly chalked in white on black walls surrounding a large pool, atop which inquiry documents from Indigenous deaths in
custody had been placed.
The win thrust the shy but profoundly thoughtful Moore into the spotlight. He once wrote to me that his birth in Toowoomba, Queensland, in 1970 was “still under the White Australia policy in a legal sense”, adding that “others identified me through the usual racist words for Aboriginal while I tried to be invisible”. Before the Biennale, I asked whether Australia had a blind spot, as he was only the second solo Indigenous artist to represent the country, following photographer Tracey Moffatt in 2017. There had also been duo and trio Indigenous shows in 1990 and 1997. “It won’t be the last, I don’t think,” he replied.
Ellie Buttrose, who curated kith and kin,
tells me a change of rules at Venice several years ago enabled Moore’s selection for the Australian pavilion at a time his work was little known overseas. Previously, private collectors were commissioners, but now the national governments—in Australia’s case, funding body Creative Australia—make the choice based on the strength of artist and curator submissions.
“Some people’s reaction to Archie’s getting the gig is that ‘you must have an international profile to get it’,” Buttrose recalls. “I think Archie has proved that, no, you can make your international profile through this.” Moore’s Golden Lion win vindicated that approach—demonstrating that Venice could be a platform for launching international careers, not merely confirming established ones.
Might Moore’s monolithic work be understood as asserting Indigenous sovereignty on a global scale? “Yes, I think in a sense the pavilion kind of becomes this symbolic embassy in a way. People have [also] asked if it’s Australian soil, like in regular embassies—does Australia own it?” she laughs.
Now, Moore is “in the early stages of discussion with people” about international projects, Buttrose confirms. “I think one of the reasons people were surprised is that maybe Archie’s not a big market person in a way, right? He doesn’t produce a lot of work.” Rather, Moore is known
for large-scale installations that command gallery spaces, most notably Dwelling, a work he has returned to across multiple iterations, each time recreating his childhood home in a new context.
white chalk drawings at the 2024 Venice Biennale.
Image: Andrea Rossetti (courtesy of The Commercial).
Image courtesy of NGV
“Kngwarray’s work stems not from Western tradition, but from Anmatyerr law,
Country, ceremony.”
The long arc of recognition
Buttrose says the rise of Indigenous art globally represents a long arc starting in 2002 with the Documenta 11 exhibition in Kassel, Germany. Led by Nigerian-born Okwui Enwezor—the exhibition’s first non European curator—it challenged Western hierarchies and began dismantling the biases embedded in the Venice Biennale and the broader commercial art scene.
Kelli Cole agrees what is happening now is the result of a long, steady build by institutions, art centres and curators supporting Indigenous artists and ensuring their work is presented with cultural integrity. “We’re also seeing some of our leading First Nations artists represented by major international commercial galleries—artists like Vincent Namatjira and Daniel Boyd,” she adds. Namatjira, greatgrandson of Western Arrernte watercolourist Albert Namatjira, was the first Indigenous artist to win the Archibald Prize for portraiture. “That kind of representation gives their work greater reach and visibility in the global art market, and signals a real shift in how the art world values and understands First Nations art practice.”
Boyd paints detailed works of Indigenous leaders and warriors, landscapes and his own family, making links between histories of the spread of colonisation and unacknowledged pasts of slavery, including in Australia. The 43-year-old is of Kudjala, Gangalu, Wangerriburra, Wakka Wakka, Gubbi Gubbi, Kuku Yalanji and Bundjalung descent, with ni-Vanuatu heritage.
When I visited his inner Sydney studio in 2022, Boyd spoke about what international audiences might appreciate in Australian Indigenous art: “The beauty of art is about sharing experiences and how you relate to different communities,” he said. “We have to understand the beauty in difference and not fall into the trap of homogenous global experience.”
His art implicates all of us across the seas. One of Boyd’s best-known paintings, Treasure Island, correlated the British annexing of Australia as a colony with piracy. “It was a way to transcend authorship of a particular narrative, to give people the tools to think about how we relate to place,” he told me. He carried the theme to his 2021 exhibition in Seoul, where he spoke of Enlightenment and imperialism, and British botanist Sir Joseph Banks’s request to transfer breadfruit from Tahiti to the Caribbean to feed enslaved people.
His work, he says, “is about these global
connections that led us to this point: how we
represent people through media and cinema or through art, and how we can work towards a better future through that understanding of our responsibility to people that aren’t part of these dominant forces.”
Girramay/Yidinji/Kuku-Yalanji artist Tony Albert, whose work ranges from deconstructing Aboriginal kitsch to his photographic series Brothers, about the discrimination young Aboriginal men face, says the art world is catching up with artistic excellence that has always existed. “All eyes
are on us for a very good reason,” says Albert, whose work featured in the NGV’s The Stars We Do Not See. In late 2025 he was awarded the Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres at a
ceremony at the French embassy in Canberra.
“238 years is very small compared to 65,000,” he points out. “It’s compelling not just what is told but what has not been told and for what reasons. I always thought, ‘I’m never going to be a recipient of the Venice Biennale because I don’t
belong to one of two galleries in this country’. Look at what happens when we change that; we win the greatest prize.”
Expanding the frame
Myles Russell-Cook, whose maternal ancestors were born on Wotjobaluk land and who curated The Stars We Do Not See, says the exhibition “reveals more about what we have in common, where two nations have a similar history of navigating colonisation”.
For many visitors, the exhibition was a revelation. “A lot of people in North America maybe don’t know very much about Australia but are genuinely blown away when they realise this whole other world of art that they’ve not been exposed to,” Russell Cook continues. “It’s not
only 65,000 years of history, but also contemporary media, over 250 different language groups … they have probably a very singular image of Indigenous art in mind, and this show explodes that.”
He says inherently political Indigenous Australian works sometimes speak to civil rights movements internationally. Kamilaroi, Kooma, Jiman and Goreng Goreng artist Richard Bell’s work The Truth Hurts includes the text ‘White Lies Matter’, responding to the Black Lives Matter movement and the 2020 murder of George Floyd by a police officer in the United States. “This conversation in Australia was about Aboriginal deaths in custody, so it’s a specific Australian context but very much linked by that movement of protests and people calling for accountability,” Russell Cook explains.
Another Kamilaroi artist, Warraba Weatherall, whose site-specific sculpture at the Hawai’i Triennial in 2025 examined the violence of mid-nineteenth-century scientific racism, says the work was well received, particularly by the First Nations community there. “They very much understood similar situations to the work,” he says. “There are specifics that are grounded in Kamilaroi Country or Queensland or New South Wales, but they’re also global issues; the British Empire had control of over half of the globe at one point in time.”
Barkandji artist Nici Cumpston OAM, until recently curator of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander art at the Art Gallery of South Australia, has taken up the role of director of the Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection in the US.
She says scholarship, as well as support and platforms for artists to discuss their work, is critical if the undeniable increase in interest in Indigenous Australian artists is to be sustained. Important exhibitions are being developed by institutions like Kluge-Ruhe, part of the University of Virginia, and Fondation Opale in Switzerland.
“By providing an artist an opportunity to share what they’re creating, that platform is what’s needed, where we get to the crux of what it is. What are these stories?” says Cumpston. “The more that we can have these opportunities, the better it’s going to be, because the commercial world is one thing, but it’s about people understanding and having the opportunity to learn the depth underlying the art. But those opportunities are limited.”
Arrernte/Kalkadoon artist Thea Anamara Perkins, who paints landscapes of her desert Country in Central Australia as well as intimate portraits of her famous family including her activist grandfather Charles Perkins—welcomes the decentralising of Western narratives.
“There is a total paradigm shift and a questioning of that centralisation and its origins in history and its primacy, which has opened up space [for] listening,” she says.
While Perkins feels “wonderful support” from Australia’s art community and audiences celebrating Aboriginal art, she sees an interesting difference in how her work is received at art fairs in Canada and Tokyo or the Australian embassy in Berlin.
“As we know from the referendum, there is a lot of prejudice, and [First Nations history] is not well taught in the curriculum,” she says. “Once you take it out of an Australian context, there are fewer barriers.” International audiences, she explains, do not carry the same cultural baggage. “Those barriers don’t exist for an international audience. They’re not part of the collective [Australian] psyche.”
Kelli Cole sees confidence in this moment due to the long, strong advocacy by institutions and curators for Australian Indigenous artists. “Globally the art industry is finally seeing the strength, sophistication and power that’s always been present in our First Nations art.”
Image courtesy of AGNSW.