Tony Albert is one of Australia’s most important artistic voices 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.

Albert is acknowledged industry wide as a valued ambassador for Indigenous community and culture whose practice has gained increased international momentum in the past decade. He was recently announced as the inaugural Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain First Nations Curatorial Fellow. He is the first Indigenous Trustee for the Art Gallery of New South Wales, a member of the Art Gallery of New South Wales Indigenous advisory, a board member for the City of Sydney's Public Art Panel and member of the Art & Place Board at the Queensland Children's Hospital and in January 2023 he was awarded an Honorary Doctorate by Griffith University for his significant contribution to the arts. In 2022 he participated in aabaakwad (it clears after a storm), a gathering of international Indigenous artists, curators and thinkers at the 2022 Venice Biennale as part of the programming for the Nordic/ Sami Pavilion, curated by Wanda Nanibush.

Albert was recently awarded several prestigious public commissions both within Australia and internationally, including an installation for Public Art Fund’s Global Positioning, which debuted in January 2022 on bus shelters throughout New York City, Chicago, and Boston. He represented Australia with his commission for Constellations: Global Reflections, a first of its kind exhibition curated by world-renowned US based art curator Lance Fung which took place during the 2022 G20 Summit in Bali. Also, in 2022 he was included in Prime: Arts Next Generation (Phaidon) featuring the top 100 most distinctive and innovative young artists from around the world. Most recently, renowned Indigenous collective proppaNOW, of which Tony is a founding member, were awarded the prestigious 2022-24 Jane Lombard Prize for Art and Social Justice (USA).

Upcoming commissions within Australia include Inhabitant, a monumental 15-metre-long floating botanical sculpture which will welcome visitors at the entrance of the transformed Queen’s Wharf in Brisbane, and The Big Hose, an iconic outdoor play sculpture for QAGOMA which is being made in collaboration with artist Nell. His collaboration with Angela Tiatia, Murmurations, was launched at Museum of History NSW, Hyde Park Barracks, Sydney in 2023 and Two Worlds Colliding, a culturally informed design and artwork for Allianz Sydney Football Stadium was unveiled in 2022. Other significant national commissions include Healing Land, Remembering Country, NIRIN: the 22nd Biennale of Sydney (2020). House of Discards, The National: New Australian Art, Carriageworks, Sydney (2019): I am Visible, The National Gallery of Australia (2019) and Yininmadyemi Thou didst Let Fall Sydney Hyde Park War Memorial, City of Sydney (2015).

Albert is strongly represented in major national and international collections including Fondation Opal, Switzerland; National Gallery of Australia; National Gallery of Victoria; Australian War Memorial, Canberra; Parliament House New South Wales, Sydney; Art Gallery of New South Wales; Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney; Art Gallery of Western Australia; Art Gallery of South Australia; and Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art.

Renowned Australian painter and printmaker Margaret Preston’s (1875-1963) was one of the first non-Indigenous Australian artists to incorporate and center Aboriginal life and culture and position it into a national visual language. Working in the early 20th century, her still lifes were bound with the ideas and aesthetics of Modernism, which included, as it did for her contemporaries in Europe (she studied in Munich, Paris, and London), appreciation and appropriation of non-European art. Working a century apart from Preston, acclaimed Aboriginal artist Tony Albert, appropriates her still lifes of native flowers to enter into a dialogue not only with Preston’s artistic legacy and that of Modernism, as do many of his contemporaries, but also reckons with the tradition and inheritance of Aboriginalia, which Preston’s work inadvertently quickened, and challenges our understanding of appropriation, contemporary Australian and Aboriginal visual culture, and Indigenous sovereignty.

Like many a modernist artist in search of primitivism and other art forms from colonized or exotic places and cultures, Preston had also traveled throughout Asia, where she was heavily influenced by Japanese woodblock prints and Chinese landscapes. A student of Aboriginal art and design (she had traveled extensively throughout Australia), at the time she held progressive beliefs about the depth and intricacy of Aboriginal art and what it meant for national Australian identity and expression and world art. Preston's views reflected developments in European art influenced by colonial expansion and extraction, while they were also paralleled by the Australian government's assimilation policies in place at the time. Unlike her European counterparts -living and working in the context of a settler colonial state (founded on the premise that Aboriginal people were primitive and intellectually inferior people either be eliminated or assimilated) hers seems to have been as much a nation-building project as about Australian art’s unique contribution to Modernism, namely Aboriginal art’s flat design, solid colors, and symbols.

Aboriginal art was not only a subject matter and style to be adopted and freely appropriated by white Australians like herself, but also applied widely to all aspects of Australian life, from the decorative arts to home décor. Aboriginal flora and fauna and Indigenous motifs, designs, and earthy colors became the defining element of Preston’s hand colored woodcut still lives of native flowers, distinguished by striking geometric forms and defined by prominent black outlines. A lowly regarded genre in the hierarchy of high art, still lifes allowed Preston to explore different styles, colors and compositions and bridging the gap between art and craft, but also, on account of her gender, her prints were dismissed by critics as decorative. Still, she saw potential in the decorative arts and crafts for their mass appeal and reach beyond the traditional art world.

Establishing Australia’s national aesthetic on craft, she believed, would put women at its forefront and safeguard that Indigenous art and design remained vibrant and relevant in a modern, cosmopolitan Australia. Preston’s success as an artist and encouragement inadvertently also paved the way for the cultural pillaging and extractive economy that followed as Aboriginal designs and motifs were plastered on everything from tea towels to ashtrays, fabric design, biscuit tins, figurines, ornaments and prints , all of which have become Albert’s primary materials.

Albert’s practice has long centered around his vast collection of Aboriginalia, Aboriginal cultural designs and figures in souvenirs, bric-a-brac, and home decor, which he’s amassed since childhood. Trafficking in racist stereotypes, these objects and designs were easily recognized, commodified, and imitated. They became widely available and accessible, perhaps achieving the totalizing effect if not the spirit of Preston’s project. At least since 2021, Albert, in his signature use of Aboriginalia, has been in dialogue with Preston and the legacy of her work taking up her call and vision for an Aboriginal national visual identity. For his Sullivan+Strumpf booth at this year’s Armory Show, Albert presents his third series in this body of work, Unpacking History, which began with Conversations with Margaret Preston and later with Remarks.

As in these earlier series, in some 7 new paintings, Albert appropriates Preston’s work and signature style to engage with Preston and her ideas and through her with a contemporary public about art, identity, and their interrelation. Retaining Preston’s stark and geometric shapes but filling them in with scraps of fabric from his collection, Albert uses the very same imagery of exploitative tropes that Preston’s work spawned to disturb and complicate their reading and reception today. Colourful vintage fabrics full of text, figures, designs that literally and figuratively read “Aboriginal art” is meticulously composed to evoque or mimic Preston, while offering a dialectical juxtaposition of high art and mass-reproduced culture that is a hallmark of post-War contemporary art. 

Less interested in decrying her appropriation and inappropriate use of sacred images without acknowledgment or respect, which goes without saying and has been rehearsed by many other artists who have also taken Preston to task, Albert’s intentions are to reconcile her aims of promoting Aboriginal art within Modernism and the unintended outcome of reducing it to kitsch caricatures and commodity objects. The double appropriation, Preston’s modernist iconography and pop culture’s Aboriginalia, stages the tension between the two in Albert’s work, while reclaiming and returning both to their origin, an Aboriginal maker and rightful inheritor and custodian of the legacies of Aboriginal art, in Modernism and in Aboriginalia. Albert’s approach, that is an earnest conversation with Preston and her legacy, both engages with the premise of her argument and work of positioning Aboriginal art within Modernism and extends it into the present and within contemporary art, where for better or for worse it exists alongside Aboriginalia.

For Albert, much like for Preston for whom still lifes were ‘really laboratory tables on which aesthetic problems can be isolated,’ the quiet radicalism of still lives, the prosaic nature of the subject matter, allows for experimentation with form and meaning and way to explore broader question about genre, gender, self (determination), and cultural appropriation. Nesting Aboriginalia’s troubling presence within Preston’s flowers and domain of domestic respectability, can also be understood as a queer gesture of sorts and part of Albert’s ongoing investigation of visibility and invisibility. But Albert doesn’t hide or conceal Aboriginalia so much as contextualises, interprets and recasts it from an Aboriginal perspective, underscoring its role in the erasure and subjugation of Aboriginal people.

Removing these harmful images and objects, remnants of a violent and oppressive history, as he does, from circulation and their intended use in white homes, cutting up, remixing and resetting them in Preston’s outlines of Native flora, Albert enters them into renewed conversations about Australian Aboriginal identity and contemporary art.

Albert’s with Preston and his reclamation of Aboriginalia enacts the principles Indigenous self-determination, which includes how to deal with and reconcile pernicious legacy and presence of Aboriginalia in contemporary Australia. Turning nineteenth century European landscape and still life genre on its head, Albert’s still lives are similarly bound with ideas of conquest, ownership, and possession but this time of taking back and making one’s own and make proper Aboriginal art, design, and life (including its misappropriation) by and for Aboriginal people. Owning and using Aboriginalia, as Albert and other Aboriginal artists have, restores these objects and images to whence they came from and to those most impacted by their reproduction as racist tropes. That Albert, and other First Nations artists, now critically appropriate, quote, and parody Aboriginalia in their art, where these images and objects now circulate for sale in the contemporary art market as Aboriginal art on its own terms, is a means of reconciliation by way of restitution and reparations. Albert doesn’t stop there: his repurposing and reclamation of Aboriginalia finds its way back into tea towels, coasters, or wearables, making Aboriginal art and design accessible and available outside of the traditional art world, much like Preston had envisioned and perhaps closer to the national visual identity she’d imagined.