Steven Rendall and Albert TuckerData for Future Paintings

In this project, contemporary Melbourne artist Steven Rendall has drawn on selected studies and photographs by Albert Tucker as the starting point for a new series of artworks, which are presented in this exhibition alongside the original source material.

Over the course of his career, Tucker compulsively recorded and amassed pictures as ‘data for future paintings’. Combining Tucker’s ideas and iconographies with his own distinctive codes, Rendall remixes Tucker’s visual observations, use of shapes and mark making via a range of strategies. He skews compositions through grids and fragmentary planes, as well as offering more direct translations of Tucker’s work, to consider the legacies of those who precede us and the practice of art making itself.

The exhibition incorporates the selection of Tucker’s images that underpin Rendall’s enquiry, among them: photographs and sketches from the 1940s and 50s, including from his trip to Japan as a War Correspondent in 1947, where he witnessed the devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki following nuclear attacks; drawings made while living in Paris; a double portrait photograph of Joy Hester; and his well-known 1945 cover design for the Angry Penguins magazine.

Like Rendall, Tucker was often informed by the work of other artists. Tucker maintained that all painters were in a sense ‘interconnected and interrelated’, and that creative ‘cross-fertilisation’ was a valid and necessary approach. This exhibition performs as an intertwining of the two artists’ practices and distinct points of view. An experimental correspondence that reaches across time and space, it ruptures, reworks and transforms appearances, surfaces, methods and ideas.