Art review Mysterious and monumental works rooted in cultural practice

Painting quickly and directly, with few revisions and no changes of heart, Emily Kam Kngwarray's art is filled with exhilarations and with difficulties.

- Adrian Searle

Painting quickly and directly, with few revisions and no changes of heart, Emily Kam Kngwarray's art is filled with exhilarations and with difficulties. Part of the pleasure of her art is that it is so immediate, so visually accessible, with its teeming fields and clusters of finger-painted dots, its sinuous and looping paths, its intersections and branchings. You can get lost in there, and sometimes overwhelmed. You can feel the connection between her hand and eye, and the bodily gestures she makes as she paints.

Kngwarray's paintings may well remind you of a kind of gestural abstraction; they have nothing to do with; they are about a different order of experience to the similar kinds of brushstrokes driven this way and that around other, more familiar, canvases we may also find in Tate Modern, where her retrospective has arrived from the National Gallery of Australia. But this similarity is also one of the reasons Kngwarray became famous in the first place.