Albert TuckerMobile Home

In 1952, Albert Tucker famously designed and constructed a caravan in his room in the Hotel de Verneuil on Paris’ Left Bank. Much to the intrigue and amusement of the hotel proprietor and the local police, Tucker built the caravan components from raw materials by hand before lowering each piece from the hotel window into the street below, where he assembled the whole. Tucker lived in the caravan with his partner Mary Dickson on the banks of the Seine for several months before departing Paris for the south of France and Italy with the caravan in tow.

Over the course of the next four years, Tucker’s thematic concerns in his painting shifted dramatically, inspired both by the cultural histories he encountered and by memories of home. The trip brought with it the opportunity to consider Australia from a different vantage point and would be a catalyst for a new and fruitful period of engagement with Australian myth-making. Taking the metaphor of the caravan as a mobile-home as its starting place, this exhibition explores how Tucker internalised themes from home and carried them with him through his travels.