Pace will present a solo booth of paintings by Emily Kam Kngwarray at the inaugural Frieze Abu Dhabi, which runs from 19 to 22 November 2026 at Manarat Al Saadiyat. The presentation, at booth D08, spans the artist's entire career, from her early batik textiles and paintings through to her later colourist canvases and abstractions inspired by the anwerlarr yam, and includes paintings never exhibited before.

A member of the Anmatyerr people of Alhalker in Australia's Northern Territory, Kngwarray grounded her practice in Indigenous Australian knowledge systems and a profound custodial connection to ancestral land. She first worked in batik, a textile dyeing technique introduced to the Utopia Women's Batik Group in 1977, and only turned to painting on canvas in the late 1980s, when she was in her seventies. In the eight years that followed she produced an estimated 3,000 paintings.

Works on the booth include Desert Tracks (1992), in which she rendered the forms of her country in compositions overlaid with fields of singular and concentric double dots, alongside early batiks such as an untitled work on silk from 1981 and later canvases including Merne Everything (1991) and Anatye – Bush Potato (1995).

The presentation follows Kngwarray's major solo exhibition at Tate Modern in London, which travelled to Fondation Opale in Lens, Switzerland. Coinciding with the fair, her work will also feature in a Frieze talk on curating across knowledge systems, with Kelli Cole, curator of her exhibitions at the National Gallery of Australia and Tate Modern, in discussion with Claudia Segura and Cosmin Costinas.