Tony Albert

Australia

Tony Albert is one of Australia’s foremost contemporary artists with a longstanding interest in the cultural misrepresentation of Aboriginal people. Drawing on both personal and collective histories, his multidisciplinary practice considers the ways in which optimism might be utilised to overcome adversity. His work poses crucial questions such as how do we remember, give justice to, and rewrite complex and traumatic histories?

Albert is the first Indigenous Trustee for the Art Gallery of New South Wales. His commitment to connecting and collaborating with other artists has made him an integral part of Australia’s contemporary arts community.

Albert’s important work has been acknowledged industry-wide with multiple prestigious awards and commissions. Two major public art commissions have recently been announced including Albert’s monumental 15-metre-long floating botanical sculpture, Inhabitant, which will welcome visitors at the entrance of the transformational Queen’s Wharf in Brisbane, and The Big Hose, an iconic outdoor play sculpture for Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art which is being made in collaboration with artist Nell. Also in 2022, Albert was commissioned to design a major artwork to adorn the new Sydney Football Stadium’s seats.

Albert’s major installation Healing Land, Remembering Country was unveiled at the 2020 Biennale of Sydney. In 2019 Carriageworks presented a major 5m high sculpture, House of Discards, commissioned for The National 2019: New Australian Art. In the same year Albert was commissioned by The National Gallery of Australia to deliver a significant illuminated public artwork, I am Visible. In 2013 Albert was commissioned by the City of Sydney to create an artwork for the Sydney Hyde Park War Memorial, installed in Hyde Park South on Anzac Day 2015 to commemorate indigenous soldiers.

Albert is strongly represented in major national collections including the National Gallery of Australia; the Australian War Memorial, Canberra; the Art Gallery of New South Wales; the Art Gallery of Western Australia and Brisbane’s Gallery of Modern Art—Queensland Art Gallery.

Notions of otherness – the ‘Alien’ – are subverted through the saturation of Western iconography adorning these images. Exploring how developing countries engage with the Western world, and vice versa, Albert interrogates imagined and constructed understandings of otherness. Situating himself as a visitor, Albert engages local tradition, personal narrative, and collectively relatable symbolism, to ask – who is the Alien here?

Tony Albert’s series Crop Circles of Yogya was developed during a residency at Cemeti Art House, Yogyakarta in 2016. Albert took portraits of Yogyakarta locals wearing farmer’s conical hats which he had turned into wearable UFOs. The photographs were then hand embellished with stickers of pop culture symbolism.

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