‘Dad’
David Tucker

Exhibition Dates
6TH – 25TH FEBRUARY

Daily
Tuesday – Saturday
1 – 6PM
Or by appointment

Check details on Instagram for any changes to opening times

Private View
THURSDAY 1ST FEBRUARY 2024
6 – 9PM

Opening
Saturday 3RD FEBRUARY
12 – 8PM

David Tucker, b. 1973, studied architecture at University of North London.
In addition to being an artist, he has also written and directed films for Channel 4 and the London Film Council. Bringing his two passions together, he has pioneered a technique of digitally deconstructing the paint strokes of his portraits and then reconstructing them while hearing the subjects of them talking. This technique has been used in several commissioned pieces, including a series of portraits for ‘Not Forgotten’, which featured the last survivors of WW1 and WW2.
One of these portraits was of the late Harry Patch, accompanied by the music of Radiohead.

‘Dad’

“An exploration into the slow grieving process brought on by ambivalent loss. Discovering the space between destruction and re-creation of oneself.”
David Tucker

The exhibition is the culmination of four year’s work. When he began, the focus was solely on his father, who passed away in 2022, one week after his seventy-eighth birthday, having first shown signs of the illness aged only sixty-one. However, it developed into something more with the onset of lockdown in 2020, which resulted in the artist metaphorically ‘putting the mirrors up on the walls’ of his studio, a process of self-evaluation that led to him contemplating himself not just as a son to a father with Alzheimer’s, but as a father to his own two children. These meditations are meshed into the fabric of each of the thirty-plus artworks that have been brought together for this show, and in the case of the oil sculptures almost literally. The presentation is not only brave in its undertaking, but also experimental in its execution.

The mainstay for this show is oil paint on glass, but it is also used on canvas, along with crystals, latex and charcoal, visceral mediums which the artist harnesses to powerful effect. ‘Dad‘, 2019, is typical. Echoing the work of Frank Auerbach and Lucian Freud, Tucker builds an unflinching 3-dimensional portrait of his father with thick layers of oil applied impasto onto six glass panels. These and the other portraits are presented in the same way, such as to give a sense of the subject floating in time, creating a spatial relationship that transcends what can be offered by paint on canvas. Additionally, when seen from the other side, we see a second portrait, suggesting a glimpse of the hidden self. Meanwhile, the latex and charcoal work, entitled ‘The Light Bringers’, 2023, have the quality of movement, the heads turning and twisting, as if in prayer. The ‘Darkened oil work’, with their sculptural quality of thickly applied paint that builds off and breaks the parameters of the square canvas, have equal intensity, drawing the viewer close to see the portrait created by the dark palette.

Some of the self-portraits were destroyed and reconstituted, which saw Tucker scraping his own image off the glass then taking the dried slabs of paint and forcing them into a mesh which he had impressed his face into. These ‘recycled oil portraits’ are not, as with those on glass, noticeably him, but literal and metaphysical reconstructions configured from his flesh tones.

For more information, please contact
Albany Arts Communications
Carla von der Becke
carla@albanyartscommunications.com
t: +44 (0) 207 879 8895
m: +44 (0) 7557 262 382