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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.
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Six-time Archibald prize finalist Richard Lewer had wanted to paint Pitjantjatjara Elder, artist and healer Iluwanti Ken for a long time, and the wait has paid off with his first win of the $100,000 portrait prize.
“I was a very lucky man to paint Iluwanti,” said Lewer, motioning towards his subject, who had journeyed from the Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara (APY) lands of South Australia to the Art Gallery of New South Wales to see the artist receive the 2026 honour.
“It’s an absolute pleasure that you gave me your time [on] your Country and you let me paint you.”
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Deborah Mailman sat in rusty red sand on Arrernte country in central Australia, and she felt her character’s deep grief. She was filming a scene in Warwick Thornton’s 1930s frontier western Wolfram, playing Pansy, an Indigenous woman whose children have been stolen from her.
As her bundled baby cries, Pansy silently cuts her hair off with a knife – “a grieving ritual”, Mailman says – even though her missing children might still be alive.
Mailman is the mother of two boys herself, Henry, 19, and Oliver, 16. Portraying Pansy’s anguish, she says, “requires no acting”.
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