David Tucker , Dad at Gallery 46, Whitechapel, East London, February 2024 – A first visit of the year to the often rewarding (sometime infuriating) East London space known as Gallery 46 over there in Whitechapel. As we said the other day as part of the Five Art Things  preview, Gallery 46 are rather good when it comes to debuts, this is a particularly good one – 

“The debut solo exhibition of London-based painter, David Tucker – entitled ‘Dad’, a beautiful and sometime dark portrayal through self portraits of unconditional love”.

– The exhibition so we’re told, “explores the artist’s ‘self’, through self portraits, in a delicate, tender approach of layering, constructing and reworking his painting practice, from his emotional journey of love for loved ones”. This is a powerful exhibition, a powerfully subtle, show, demanding of the viewer, intimate, quiet, understated, warm. The conversations feel personal, just you and the individual pieces, quiet conversations, maybe more like overheard conversations, almost whispers, private ones? Intimate even though things are rather bold in here. Physically it does play tricks, unintentionally perhaps. It is rather bright in that main room, you’re almost rendered snow-blind in there as the pieces almost hover in mid air messing with your perspective (or was that just me?). A bright white room contrasting with the matt black room at the top of the stairs of the old nurse’s house. It does feel very personal, most good art is but this is something a little more. “Over the course of three years, artist David Tucker lived with and cared for his father while he suffered through dementia. The artwork in this show documents and reacts to that period of suffering and loss”        

“An exploration into the slow grieving process brought on by ambivalent loss. Discovering the space between destruction and re-creation of oneself.” – David Tucker

Intense, deeply personal, at times rather beautiful, the exhibition is the culmination of work from a period when at first the focus was solely on his father. However, it apparently “developed into something more for the artist with the onset of lockdown in 2020, something that resulted in the artist metaphorically ‘putting the mirrors up on the walls’ of his studio, a process of self-evaluation that led to him contemplating himself not just as a son to a father but as a father to his own two children”.

These thoughts, movements, observations are kind of meshed into the fabric of each of the thirty-plus pieces that have been brought together for the show, and in the case of the oil sculptures almost literally. And as the gallery point out themselves in their show statement,  “The presentation is not only brave in its undertaking, but also experimental in its execution” – actually it isn’t that easy to figure out what you’re looking at or what David Tucker has dome with splintered works on sheets of glass and layers of dried paint pressed onto mesh?

The mainstay for this show is apparently the oil paint on glass, the paint is also used on canvas, along with crystals, latex and charcoal – lot of that energy that only comes from charcoal in here –  “visceral mediums which the artist harnesses to powerful effect”.  And yes, flavours of Frank Auerbach, Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud, there is in David Tucker’s work something bold, a an understated boldness in these almost but not quite three-dimensional portraits with their thick layers of oil paint applied onto the layers of glass panels. A little more than just a portrait on a canvas – and then there is another side to the glass as you walk around, we’re getting into Peter Hammill territory here, the other selves and the other dimensions and which is the real one? 

And then there’s the pieces with the latex and/or the charcoal, charcoal always brings movement, heads turning – head turning – and then the self-portraits, semi destroyed and reconstituted – pieces that saw the artist “scraping his own image off the glass then taking the dried slabs of paint and forcing them into a mesh which he had impressed his face into. These ‘recycled oil portraits’ are not, as with those on glass, noticeably him, but literal and metaphysical reconstructions configured from his flesh tones”.

And you kind of find yourself wandering through the upstairs rooms of the gallery, the black room, the white room, the rooms in between, the glass, the charcoal on the way and on the walls, around the back or is it really the front of the pieces? The real front, the real face? You look for clues, not so much clues and signs, there are none of course but you find the emotions, you can’t miss the emotion, you walk around again, in your own time, in his space, the artist’s head space, you reverse, you look again, the conversations continue… (sw)

Gallery 46 is found at 46 Ashfield Street, Whitechapel, London E1.  The show is open now and runs until February 18th, the gallery is open 1pm until 6pm, Tuesday through to Sunday.

Previous Gallery 46 coverage via Organ

As always, do click on an images to see it in full or to run the slide show…