LONDON.- Gallery46 has debuted a solo exhibition of London-based painter, David Tucke, where it will continue until February 22nd. Entitled Dad, the presentation explores the artist’s encounter with dementia in relation to his father’s Alzheimer’s disease, which he experienced closely while he lived with and cared for him over a three-year period. Most people will have encountered this illness directly or tangentially, and Tucker’s work offers something which is on one level intensely personal, but also universal, revealing through portraiture of his father and himself the effects Alzheimer’s can take both on the sufferer and their loved ones.

The exhibition is the culmination of four year’s work. When he began, the focus was solely on his father, who passed away in 2022, one week after his seventy-eighth birthday, having first shown signs of the illness aged only sixty-one. However, it developed into something more with the onset of lockdown in 2020, which 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 with Alzheimer’s, but as a father to his own two children. These meditations are meshed into the fabric of each of the thirty-plus artworks that have been brought together for this show, and in the case of the oil sculptures almost literally. The presentation is not only brave in its undertaking, but also experimental in its execution.

The mainstay for this show is oil paint on glass, but it is also used on canvas, along with crystals, latex and charcoal, visceral mediums which the artist harnesses to powerful effect. Dad, 2019, is typical. Echoing the work of Frank Auerbach and Lucian Freud, Tucker builds an unflinching 3- dimensional portrait of his father with thick layers of oil applied impasto onto six glass panels.

These and the other portraits are presented in the same way, such as to give a sense of the subject floating in time, creating a spatial relationship that transcends what can be offered by paint on canvas. Additionally, when seen from the other side, we see a second portrait, suggesting a glimpse of the hidden self. Meanwhile, the latex and charcoal work, entitled The Light Bringers, 2023, have the quality of movement, the heads turning and twisting, as if in prayer. The ‘Darkened oil work’, with their sculptural quality of thickly applied paint that builds off and breaks the parameters of the square canvas, have equal intensity, drawing the viewer close to see the portrait created by the dark palette.

Some of the self-portraits were destroyed and reconstituted, which saw Tucker 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.

Says Martin Tickner, Artistic Director of Gallery46: ‘David Tucker’s paintings go far and beyond a testament to his own encounter with Alzheimer’s, radiating out to anyone who has, through this illness, been impelled to experience the difficult role reversal of becoming parent to a parent. His paintings and sculptures reveal an artist willing to break through the barriers painting can impose to offer something beyond literal interpretation, in his case charting the process of grieving brought on by ambivalent loss.’

David Tucker

David Tucker, b. 1973, studied architecture at University of North London. In addition to being an artist, he has also written and directed films for Channel 4 and the London Film Council. Bringing his two passions together, he has pioneered a technique of digitally deconstructing the paint strokes of his portraits and then reconstructing them while hearing the subjects of them talking.

This technique has been used in several commissioned pieces, including a series of portraits for ‘Not Forgotten’, which featured the last survivors of WW1 and WW2. One of these portraits was of the late Harry Patch, accompanied by the music of Radiohead.