Untitled

Tony Tuckson is widely acknowledged as Australia's pre-eminent abstract expressionist painter. From the late 1950s, Tuckson abandoned representations of the figure in his art and developed a spectacular abstract aesthetic that he worked on in various distinct phases throughout the 1960s until his death in the early 1970s. His style moved from an early calligraphic emphasis on mark making to his final sensuous and sweeping veils of paint that one critic referred to as Tuckson's own formula for the sublime.

'Abstract on hardboard no. 3' stylistically sits within Tuckson's early forays into pure abstraction circa 1960. On a white ground, typical of this period, Tuckson has overlaid dark, expressive calligraphic-like brushwork. While one might detect the loosest trace of writing in these marks, it is the expressive force of line, brushwork and colour that have become the true subject of art, indicating the elements that would remain at the heart of his panting henceforth. In diminishing figurative structure, Tuckson emphasised speed and density of mark making, giving a sense of an unleashing of greater inner truths through the sheer physical force of painting.