When the Australian Financial Review is drawing up its next Arts Power list, Tony Albert deserves a prominent place. Given the current priorities of Australia’s leading arts institutions, it’s hard to think of any artist, apart from maybe Brook Andrew, who has shown himself to be a better exponent of ‘soft power’. Twenty years ago, Albert was largely unknown, but today he seems to be everywhere. The survey exhibition, Tony Albert: Not Souvenir, at Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art, is the crowning glory of this meteoric rise.
I doubt that any other Australian artist has been gifted a museum show of this magnitude at the age of 45. Indeed, I could reel off a list of celebrated artists who have lived and died without getting a sniff. What’s even more remarkable is that Albert has already had a “retrospective” at the Queensland Art Gallery in 2018, at the age of 33.
The catalogue that accompanies the MCA exhibition is a 400-page monster printed on hi-gloss paper, weighing almost three kilos (Yes, I weighed it). The sheer quantity of artwork it contains is astonishing, testifying to Albert’s inventiveness, and in later years, his extensive use of assistants.
Albert is currently a trustee of the Art Gallery of NSW, and part of the gallery’s Indigenous Advisory Board. Last year he acted as curator for the 5th National Indigenous Art Triennial at the National Gallery of Australia. He was the inaugural Cartier Foundation fellow for the 2024 Biennale of Sydney. He’s on the City of Sydney Public Art Panel. He has been awarded a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, and an honorary doctorate from Griffith University.
His work has been collected by all the major Australian art museums. He’s undertaken a staggering number of residencies and major commissions, including those giant-sized bullets in Sydney’s Hyde Park. The complete list of solo and group exhibitions in which he’s been involved over the past few years would be more than most artists manage in a lifetime. Last week, at the Cairns Indigenous Art Fair, Albert hosted the VIP program. He’s used his growing status to do a lot of good deeds for Indigenous causes.
You don’t get all this through being lucky. No-one could deny Tony’s talent, but it’s a more complicated matter to figure out what kind of talent he possesses.