The Heide Museum of Modern Art presents The Futile City, an exhibition on view 25 June-9 October 2011.

Taking its inspiration from Albert Tucker’s 1940 painting of the same title, The Futile City examines the rise of the city from the modern era to the present day. The exhibition juxtaposes several images of the city painted by Tucker over the course of his lifetime with those by contemporary artists for whom the city and its structures provide rich visual and thematic source material.

Albert Tucker The Futile City 1940 oil on cardboard 45 x 54.5 cm Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne Purchased from John and Sunday Reed 1980 © Barbara Tucker

Taking its cue from T.S. Eliot’s poem ‘The Waste Land’ (1922),Tucker’s painting The Futile City reflects a mood of personal despair and anxiety in the face of the social crisis of World War II. Tucker recognised in Eliot a ‘twin soul’, who painted with words images of horror, futility and prophecies of doom, to all of which Tucker had a heightened sensitivity.

Works by six contemporary artists also feature in the exhibition, including Jeffery Smart, Robert Boynes, Susan Norrie, Louise Forthun, David Jolly and Richard Giblett. Just as the city and its rhetoric were primary sources of inspiration for Tucker, so it has been for these artists. The selected works articulate aspects of the human condition and the rituals of urban existence, as well as the place of the individual within the physical, political and social structures of the city.

The Futile City is the eleventh in an ongoing series of exhibitions based on the Tucker Gift to Heide Museum of Modern Art. This series alternates between exhibitions which investigate Tucker’s oeuvre in detail, and those which place him in an art historical, theoretical or contemporary context, as this exhibition does.

Curators Jason Smith and Lesley Harding

Heide Museum of Modern Art 7 Templestowe Road Bulleen Victoria 3105 Australia
heide.com.au

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