Untitled (TD1515),
red & black gouache and ink on paper
105.0
x 74.0
cm
Provenance
Margaret Tuckson, Sydney
Watters Gallery, Sydney
Private Collection, Sydney since 2000
This is a wonderful example of a seated nude from the revered Tony Tuckson, remembered as one of Australia’s finest abstract expressionists. A bold work of simplified form and restricted colour, it reveals the artist’s preference for pink and blue usually associated with the period 1950-60. Works from this time were drawn from the world that surrounded Tuckson – his family, friends, still lifes of the dining room and kitchen, nudes and studio interiors. They hint at the inspiration and ideas ‘that were obviously coming thick and fast,’ and also at the artist’s affinity with School of Paris Modernism.
(John McPhee, ACA, April 2001)
Tim Fisher, former curator NGA, writes, ‘as an abstract painter with roots in Picasso and Matisse, Tuckson was interested in the qualities of radiance, energy, presence and inner resonance.’ Tuckson was the first to pursue Indigenous works of art as objects of beauty and infinite spiritual provenance for the Art Gallery of New South Wales, and Fisher acknowledges that ‘the vital forces that inform Tuckson’s art were found in China, Melanesia and Aboriginal Australia… though not through literal or formal quotation. Tuckson’s interest lay in “the underlying spirit of their imagery”, and how he could interpret or reinvent this subjective and symbolic state through his own body and gestures.’
Tim Fisher, ‘Tony Tuckson, Painting Forever’, National Gallery of Australia