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.

Tucker’s painting The Futile City, taking its cue from T.S. Eliot’s melancholic poem ‘The Waste Land’ (1922), reflects a mood of personal despair and anxiety in the face of a growing awareness 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. This exhibition explores the rise of the city, its rapidly increasing density in both physical and psychological senses, and closely considers the conditioning power of the city experience over individuals and communities.

Works by six contemporary artists 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 has it 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 reflects on the facts and fictions of the city, and brings together seven Australian artists whose disparate visions from 1940 to the present have alerted us to the pitfalls of the rising and expanding metropolis.

Tue-Fri 10am-5pm
Sat-Sun 9am-5pm