Cratered head

Born into relative poverty in Melbourne during the First World War, Tucker, by

the time of his death at the end of the twentieth century, had established himself as a statesman of Australian art. Alongside Arthur Boyd and Sidney Nolan, Tucker was a core member of the Angry Penguins, a group of artists concerned with promoting surrealism and expressionism in Australian art. A prolific painter, Tucker experimented with diverse and complex subject matter over the course of his career, focusing on investigating the fundamentals of the human condition through his work.

Cratered head is from a series of works depicting ‘heads’, begun by Tucker in the late 1950s, when he returned his focus to portraiture – although these works are vastly different from his earlier explorations. The work, whose title alternates between Cratered head and Antipodean head, uses thick impasto to impart a sculptural form to heads. With its craters, hills and valleys, Cratered head becomes an extra-terrestrial landscape, bereft of life and marked only by objects that have strayed too close.

Tansy Curtin, Curator, International Art pre–1980