“People stood in silence. The emotion was immediate—something deeper than understanding.”
In 1999, a landmark moment in the recognition of Aboriginal art took place inside one of Europe’s most atmospheric venues—the Oude Kerk in Amsterdam. Built in the 13th century and filled with centuries of history, the Gothic church became the unlikely, yet strikingly appropriate, site for a solo exhibition dedicated entirely to Emily Kame Kngwarreye. This was not simply another presentation of Aboriginal art abroad; it was an international milestone, placing Emily’s practice at the centre of global contemporary discourse, within a setting that carried its own profound sense of time and ceremony.
The exhibition followed Emily’s inclusion in the 1996 NANGARA exhibition in Belgium, which had already introduced European audiences to the power of Aboriginal painting. But Amsterdam went further. Here, over 150 works were assembled and displayed in sequence, forming a visual biography of an artist who, in less than a decade, produced one of the most significant bodies of work in Australian history. The gathering included the Emily Wall—a monumental installation of immersive scale—the expressive, pared-back paintings from her celebrated Final Series, and a wide cross-section of canvases that mapped the transformations of her visual language from delicate pointillism to bold, gestural abstraction.
For many visitors, this was their first direct encounter with Aboriginal art in its fullest, most unmediated form. The curatorial intent was to let Emily’s canvases speak entirely on their own terms—without reinterpretation, without reductive commentary, and without being filtered through a Western lens. In doing so, the exhibition achieved something rare: it revealed not only the breadth of Emily’s aesthetic range, but the independence and clarity of her voice as an artist. The effect was immediate and visceral. As one reflection recalled: “People stood in silence. The emotion was immediate—something deeper than understanding.”
Emily’s practice was marked by constant reinvention. In her early canvases, fields of minute dots shimmer with rhythm and density, each mark part of a larger cartography of Country. In her mid-career, the compositions opened into sweeping lines and bold forms—gestural tracings of body painting and Ceremony, carrying forward ancestral designs in a contemporary medium. Then, in the last year of her life, came her most radical works: twenty-four large canvases, painted with a broad six-centimetre brush, where colour and gesture collide in near-monumental abstraction. These phases were not discrete experiments but evolutions—each one rooted in Alhalkere, her Country, and each one carrying the presence of ancestral knowledge.
For Emily, Country was never reducible to landscape or geography. It was a living, spiritual continuum, embodied through painting. Her canvases carried stories of Ceremony, kinship, and Dreaming; they transmitted memory and law. To stand before them, in the nave of the Oude Kerk, was to be surrounded not simply by paintings, but by a resonant expression of lived tradition, translated into a visual language that was at once contemporary and timeless.
The significance of the Amsterdam exhibition extended beyond the art world. It challenged European audiences to recognise Aboriginal art not as ethnography, not as craft, but as a major contribution to global contemporary practice. It placed Emily alongside the great modernists of the 20th century, while refusing to detach her work from its cultural groundings. In that balance—modernism and tradition, innovation and continuity—the exhibition underscored the uniqueness of her vision and the universality of its impact.
Today, more than two decades later, the works shown at the Oude Kerk remain safeguarded in the Ebes Collection. They endure as more than masterpieces; they are cultural vessels, repositories of knowledge and feeling that continue to speak with undiminished power. Their preservation ensures that the moment of 1999—when silence fell in the Oude Kerk, and an artist from Utopia commanded the reverence of an international stage—remains not just a memory, but a living chapter in the ongoing story of Aboriginal art.
