TONY ALBERT, Studio Study #89 & #118, 2021

TONY ALBERT Girramay/Yidinji/Kuku Yalanji languages, born 1981 Studio Study #89 & #118, 2021 acrylic and vintage materials on canvas board 25.5 x 20.5 cm (each); 29 x 34.5 cm (each framed) signed verso 'tony ALBERT x' and bears Sullivan & Strumpf label PROVENANCE Sullivan & Strumpf, New South Wales, Cat No. TA2021-108 & TA2021-139 Private Collection, New South Wales, acquired from the above in March 2021 EXHIBITED Conversations with Margaret Preston, 19 March - 10 April 2021, Sullivan & Strumpf Gallery, Sydney, New South Wales Tony Albert's practice operates as a sustained act of demolition, taking direct and often gleeful aim at the visual apparatus of Australian racism. Central to this method is his use of collage, in which found and collected fabrics, printed with kitsch Aboriginalia motifs sourced from decades of settler manufacture, are cut, layered, and reassembled into new compositional wholes. The technique is inherently confrontational: by physically dismembering the textiles that once circulated Indigenous imagery as decorative surplus, Albert exposes how Australian culture has historically approached First Nations peoples on selective terms, absorbing their bodies, imagery, and cultural motifs into everyday objects while requiring no genuine encounter with Indigenous people themselves. The collaged surface becomes the site of reckoning, its patchwork structure visibly built from the very material evidence of that extraction. Against this pattern, Albert asserts identity, dignity, and individuality for First Nations subjects, refusing the token status assigned to them across decades of settler visual culture, and turning the fabric of that dispossession into the material ground of its own critique. © TONY ALBERT / Copyright Agency, 2026

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