John Firth-Smith. Tony Tuckson. Two Sydney Painters

About the exhibition
This two-person exhibition introduced the work of significant Sydney-based painters Tony Tuckson and John Firth-Smith to Melbourne audiences, at a time when Sydney artists had, according to curator Grazia Gunn, ‘established a different set of emphases (rather than tradition) from Melbourne painting’. The exhibition included some of Tuckson’s last paintings (he died in 1973), which were celebrated for their heroic and expressive scale, and showed  the influence of action painting and Aboriginal art on his practice. Meanwhile, Firth-Smith’s works demonstrated the artist’s increasingly bold and abstract approach to painting, which focused on creating vigour and rhythm through space, line and colour.

Acknowledgements
This exhibition and its catalogue were made possible by generous grants from the Visual Arts Board of the Australia Council and the Victorian Ministry for the Arts.

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^{Image: John Firth-Smith, Untitled, 1972, acrylic on canvas, 172.9 x 366.7, Collection: Art Gallery NSW Collection. Gifted by Rosemary Foot 1972.}