Tony Albert

Tony Albert is a contemporary artist who takes traditional Australian Aboriginal aesthetics and weaves them together with text and imagery from popular culture along with clichéd images of extraterrestrials, photographs of his family in Lucha Libre, and an immense collection of “Aboriginalia” (a term the artist coined to describe kitschy objects and images that feature naive portrayals of Aboriginality).

He presents a tapestry of ideas that makes us question the flimsy line that inscribes and ascribes ‘difference’ and interrogates contemporary legacies of colonialism. In 2013 Albert was commissioned to create an artwork for the Hyde Park War Memorial, which was installed in Hyde Park South for Anzac Day 2015 to commemorate indigenous soldiers.

Image: Thou Didst Let Fall, 2015, Sullivan Strumpf. Photo by Mark Pokorny