Paul Yore and Albert Tucker: Structures of Feeling

Paul Yore and Albert Tucker: Structures of Feeling aligns the work of two ground-breaking Australian artists from different generations. Guest curated by Aaron Bradbrook, the exhibition interrogates the socio-historical and psychological underpinnings of Albert Tucker’s widely known wartime Melbourne paintings of the early 1940s, and later urban imagery, alongside the sexually-charged critique of hetero-patriarchal culture, neo-liberalism and Anglo-American imperialism posed by Paul Yore’s textile and assemblage works.

Brought into dialogue, the exhibition offers a physical interpretation of the lurid wasteland littered with sex and death Tucker alludes to and depicts, alongside an exploration of ongoing American cultural domination, or as Yore states, “invasion”, the hegemony of which is prefigured by the original act of English colonisation on this continent. From US troops on Australian soil, to an insidious and pervasive media of increasingly graphic and explicit imagery shaping our cultural attitudes, Tucker believed what was missing from the post-war generation was they “[had] no tragic sense of life, no sense of the simple horrors of existence, no sense of their own impending death.” In this way, Yore proclaims war never ended, it merely adopted new forms.

This exhibition will include works drawn from the National Gallery of Australia, the Albert & Barbara Tucker Foundation, the Heide Collection, and private collections.