The Tucker Portraits at Wangaratta Art Gallery
Published on 16 October 2023
This spring, Wangaratta Art Gallery presents the major exhibition, The Tucker Portraits, featuring photographs and paintings by one of Australia’s foremost artists, Albert Tucker.
Albert Tucker (1914–99), was responsible for reinvigorating and re-mythologising the Australian landscape with his distinctly Modernist approach. During the Second World War he worked as an official war artist documenting wounded patients. This experience had an undeniable influence and established his highly expressive, raw style.
In the 1940s, Tucker was part of Melbourne's Heide community, alongside artists like Sidney Nolan, Joy Hester, John Perceval, and Danila Vassilieff. Heide, owned by John and Sunday Reed, fostered an environment where writers, intellectuals, and artists came together to discuss, create, and promote modern art and literature. Tucker's work is held in every major Australian collection, and retrospectives at institutions like the National Gallery of Victoria in 1989 and the Art Gallery of New South Wales in 2007, highlight his lasting legacy.
Primarily a figurative painter, Tucker critically responded to the world around him, through landscape and portraiture, however he was also an enthusiastic photographer.
From the moment he bought his first camera in 1939, Albert Tucker began documenting his life and the people and places that meant so much to him. His photographs range from studies of people that he used as source material for his paintings through to intimate portraits of his family and friends, who are today recognised as leading protagonists in Australian Modernism.
The Tucker Portraits showcases the original photographs alongside the paintings they inspired, with exclusive footage of Tucker speaking about his practice.
Wangaratta Art Gallery Director, Rachel Arndt said The Tucker Portraits is a rare opportunity to showcase one of Australia’s best-known artists in Wangaratta:
“It is incredibly exciting to have work by an artist of Albert Tucker’s calibre come to Wangaratta. Tucker’s influence as a painter has been profound, particularly his wartime series and his later exploration of the Australian landscape and its myths.
To see his photographs, both studies and portraits alongside his paintings will offer a unique insight into the mind of the artist and, in Tucker’s case, his social and political consciousness.” She said.
Albert Tucker commented that he used portraiture to try and “reach back into the past and seize that period … these people were part of my artistic life and human background … the important thing for me was to recreate their presence and fix them so that they would have some kind of immortality”.
The exhibition will be officially opened by Darren Jones, Managing Director of the Albert & Barbara Tucker Foundation on Friday 27 October from 5.30pm at Wangaratta Art Gallery. All welcome. To book your free ticket, please visit: www.wangarattaartgallery.com.au
The exhibition is open to the public from 28 October - 10 December 2023 in Gallery1, Wangaratta Art Gallery, located at 56 Ovens Street, Wangaratta. Gallery hours are Tuesday – Sunday, 10am - 4pm.
The Tucker Portraits is a Museum of Australian Photography (MAPh) touring exhibition, curated by Anouska Phizacklea.