Work by Tom Polo is currently on view in ‘Meditation on a Bone: Albert Tucker Beyond the Modern’ at Heide Museum of Modern Art. For this exhibition, artist and curator Glenn Barkley has mined Albert Tucker’s library and archive to explore how Tucker’s fascination with art of the past and other cultures informed his painting over the decades. The exhibition title cites a poem by A.D. Hope that Barkley found bookmarked in the library, a text reflecting on the way a handcrafted object links two people across several centuries. Central to Meditation on Bone is the motif of the mask, another culturally loaded device that can have meaning in both the past and the present. The show assembles a range of artists who use the mask literally and conceptually as a way to obscure meaning, invite nostalgia, and connect histories.
On view until 24 February 2019.