Albert Tucker'sGrotesques

Early in his career, Australian painter Albert Tucker (1917–1999) developed a repertoire of dark and disturbing imagery to convey his apprehension and mistrust of the modern era. He was inspired by the history of art and particularly by the revival of grotesque motifs in European culture, as progressive artists and writers looked for ways to convey their responses to rapid modernisation and societal upheaval, and to the horrors of total and mechanised war. Bolstered by the startling novelty of modern art movements, the grotesque provided a forceful and shocking means to communicate the turmoil of the times.

The human body, distorted, exaggerated and mutilated, provided Tucker with a focus for his unsettling images. His idiosyncratic visual language linked his paintings across time and a range of subjects, and included a red crescent mouth, disfigured nose, stigmatic wounds, and truncated, protoplasmic torsos. This interest in the corporeal was applied to the mythological anti-heroes of his later works, and also became his entry point to Australian landscape painting in the 1950s. His depiction of open wounds scarring the ancient desert channelled feelings of despair and anxiety, and generated a uniquely antipodean adaptation of the grotesque that has made his work highly distinctive and identifiable today.