ALBERT TUCKER AND NON-WESTERN ART

Albert Tucker held a career-long fascination with non-Western art. He first collected ‘primitive’ masks and sculptures in the 1940s, and in the late 1960s acquired many objects from the Sepik River region of Papua New Guinea, which were to provide continuous inspiration.

Like many modernists, Tucker’s interest in tribal art came via Picasso and the French cubists, who looked to African and Oceanic art as a model for alternative ways of representing the world. Such investigations helped shift artists’ reliance on naturalism, opening up the possibilities of abstraction from life. For Tucker this offered a means of conveying archetypal human experience: the personal as universal.

This exhibition traces the influence of non-Western art on Albert Tucker’s imagery and aesthetic, and includes Sepik River carvings and pottery from his personal collection.