Exhibitions
Perc Tucker Regional Gallery has two floors which contain two main exhibition spaces and five Community Access Spaces. On display are works by North Queensland artists, national touring exhibitions and international touring exhibitions.
- Townsville Galleries Highlights - April - December 2021 (PDF, 16.0 MB)
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Current Exhibition
Robert Preston: Inner Visions: Observation, Abstraction and Imagination, 1955 - 2021
Perc Tucker Regional Gallery
Exhibition dates: 18 June - 22 August 2021
Inner Visions: Observation, Abstraction and Imagination, 1955 – 2021 is the first career-spanning retrospective of Townsville-based artist, Robert Preston, and the largest and most comprehensive selection of his work to date. The exhibition covers some sixty-six years of artistic practice, and includes key works from every period of Preston’s vast oeuvre, including never-before exhibited student works, studies, commissions and commercial pieces, and the career-defining Communion to the Trees in its entirety, exhibited for the first time in two decades.
This expansive exhibition is drawn from collections public and private, and features many works, journals and ephemera drawn from the artist’s own archives, offering new insights into one of North Queensland’s most beloved and influential artists.
Curated by Jonathan McBurnie.
- 1989 Robert Preston Survey Exhibition publication (PDF, 10.2 MB)
Exhibition Launch
6 - 8pm
Friday, 18 June 2021
Perc Tucker Regional Gallery
Image: Robert Preston, Morning Raga on Contemplating Pataya, 1978, gouache on Arches dessin paper, 36 x 33cm. Collection of City of Townsville.
| Robert Preston: Artist Talk – Materials and Techniques |
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Join us for an insightful morning at the Gallery with North Queensland artist Robert Preston. In this second artist talk, listen in as Robert gives us an insight into the materials and techniques he uses in his artworks. See Robert’s exhibition Inner Visions: Observation, Abstraction and Imagination, 1955 - 2021 on show at Perc Tucker Regional Gallery 18 June – 22 August 2021. This vibrant display includes key works from every period of Preston’s vast oeuvre, including never-before exhibited student works, studies, commissions and commercial pieces, and the career-defining Communion to the Trees in its entirety, exhibited for the first time in two decades. Please note COVID safe implementations are in place including capacity restrictions. Attendance will be on a first come, first serve basis. Image: Robert Preston’s art studio with artwork Voices from a Distant Shore, 2020 - 21 |
Saturday 31 JulyUpcoming Exhibitions
Ephemera
Exhibition dates: 17 - 25 July 2021
Celebrating 20 years of Ephemera! One of North Queensland’s most anticipated events, Ephemera will once again feature an array of local, national and international sculpture, installation and ephemeral art talent. Come and enjoy the visual arts at the picturesque destination during Townsville’s glorious festival season weather, vote for your favourite artwork and discover something different and new. We’re sure you will love this very special edition of Ephemera!
Exhibition Launch
6 - 8pm
Saturday, 17 July 2021
The Strand
Image: Karl Meyer, Hand in the Sand, 2019
Strand Ephemera People’s Choice Award Winner 2019
Photograph: Andrew Rankin Photography
A Journey Through Images: 40 Years of Perc Tucker Regional Gallery
Perc Tucker Regional Gallery
Exhibition dates: 3 September - 28 November 2021
Perc Tucker Regional Gallery celebrates its fortieth anniversary with a diverse selection of work made by the artists of Townsville, the community, and staff of the gallery past and present. A Journey Through Images builds on the connections made between artist and viewer through the gallery, and through the art work, an exhibition drawn from connections, stories and anecdotes related to our city, our region and our community. Featuring Tate Adams, G.W. Bot, James Brown, William Bustard, Laura Castell, John Coburn, Ray Crooke, Russell Drysdale, Donald Friend, HAHA, Sandi Hook, Jan Hynes, Robert Jacks, Jenuarrie, Peter Lawson, Sean Leathers, Anne Lord, David Malangi, Ron McBurnie, Stewart McFarlane, George Milpurrurru, Mini Graff, David Rowe, Jan Senbergs, Anneke Silver, Madonna Staunton, Ben Trupperbaumer, Fred Williams and many more.
Exhibition Launch
6 - 8pm
Friday, 3 September 2021
Perc Tucker Regional Gallery
Image: William Bustard, Castle Hill, Townsville [detail], 1936, watercolour on paper, 31 x 41.5cm.
Collection of the City of Townsville, purchased 1995.
Fresh Material: New Australian Textile Art
Perc Tucker Regional Gallery
Exhibition dates: 3 December 2021 - 30 January 2022
Textile-based art has been enjoying a renaissance after decades of being derided, ignored or ghettoised for being ‘craft’ or ‘Women’s work’, both terms of which are dismissive artworld shorthand for ‘not art’. Contemporary artists have been reinstating the importance of textiles by way of incredible force and ingenuity, and perhaps most importantly, an intelligent and methodical dismantling of established art world ‘rules’, as clung to by the boy’s club of the 20th century. Thus textile-based art becomes a powerful and accessible agent in the examination of identity, society and politics. Textiles have grown to command a significant following in a world of a billion paintings, offering its own complex and distinctive lexicon, as capable of expression, nuance and polemic as any other media.
Australia is fortunate to be gifted with an array of intelligent, engaging, challenging and skilled artists working with textiles. This exhibition begins by taking textiles’ artistic legitimacy for granted, a point proven many times over throughout its long history, and brings together some of the best and brightest artists working in Australia today, including Regi Cherini, Leah Emery, Marion Gaemers & Lynnette Griffiths, Emma Gardner, Julie Gutman, Talitha Kennedy, Sheree Kinlyside, Nicole O’Loughlan, Susan Nampjin Peters, Ema Shin, Hiromi Tango, Sonia Ward and Jenny Watson.
Curated by Jonathan McBurnie.
Exhibition Launch
6 - 8pm
Friday, 3 December 2021
Perc Tucker Regional Gallery
Image: Leah Emery, These Are My Real Eyes Now [detail], 2020, embroidery thread on aida cloth, 30 x 50cm. Courtesy of the artist.
66th Townsville Art Awards
![Carole Howlett, Saunders Swagger [detail], 2020, Oil on canvas, 52 x 62 cm Winner of the Townsville City Council Acquisitive Award, 65th Townsville Art Awards 2020, Perc Tucker Regional Gallery, Townsville. City of Townsville Art Collection. Photo: Townsville City Galleries.](https://www.townsville.qld.gov.au/__data/assets/image/0018/113346/TASA_Carole-Howlett_Saunders-Swagger_2020_Oil-on-canvas_52-x-62-cm_-Major-winner.jpg "Carole Howlett, Saunders Swagger [detail], 2020, Oil on canvas, 52 x 62 cm Winner of the Townsville City Council Acquisitive Award, 65th Townsville Art Awards 2020, Perc Tucker Regional Gallery, Townsville. City of Townsville Art Collection. Photo: Townsville City Galleries.")
Perc Tucker Regional Gallery
Exhibition dates: 9 December 2021 - 30 January 2022
The Townsville Art Society Inc proudly presents the 66th Townsville Art Awards.
The annual Awards have been held since 1955, after a group of enthusiastic artists, the Townsville Art Group, initiated a successful exhibition called As We See It. The Townsville Art Group was the genesis of the Townsville Art Society which formed in 1962. The annual Townsville Art Awards exhibition has continued over the years with many notable artist judges providing their expertise.
Launch details
6 - 8pm
Friday, 10 December 2021
Perc Tucker Regional Gallery
Image: Carole Howlett, Saunders Swagger [detail], 2020, Oil on canvas, 52 x 62 cm
Winner of the Townsville City Council Acquisitive Award, 65th Townsville Art Awards 2020, Perc Tucker Regional Gallery, Townsville.
City of Townsville Art Collection. Photo: Townsville City Galleries.
Recent Exhibitions
Hannah Murray: Entropicana
Perc Tucker Regional Gallery
Exhibition dates: 6 April - 13 June 2021
Perc Tucker Regional Gallery is proud to support the next generation of Townsville and North Queensland-based artists. Hannah Murray is fast growing a name for herself as one of North Queensland’s most beloved artists, and Entropicana is her first major solo exhibition. Murray’s Entropicana explores the duality of life in the tropics through lush illustration, and a playful postmodern approach to composition, juxtaposing seemingly unrelated imagery to create a series of beguiling montages. Most life on this planet lives— thrives— in the tropics, and so too does it inevitably die, fulfilling its function in a greater scheme, its nutrients and energy passing along the chain to sustain new life. With the natural world in tumult, and the increasingly unpredictability of life, is our own existence any different? Murray examines such questions in an artistic voice which alternates between the sobering and bleakly humorous; an accurate and symbolic reflection of life.
Exhibition Launch
6 - 8pm
Friday, 9 April 2021
Perc Tucker Regional Gallery
Image: Hannah Murray, Floating World, 2020, Graphite on Arches Aquarelle watercolour paper, 76 x 57cm. Courtesy of the artist
Carolyn Craig and Damian Dillon: (Dis)Location
Perc Tucker Regional Gallery
Exhibition dates: 16 April - 13 June 2021
Dis(Location) examines the intangibility of affect over Australia’s post-colonial landscape. In the visual arts, this is a context where landscape is considered as a set of inter-relations between body and space, inhabitation and other cultural metaphors. The landscape serves as a site of analysis in relation to the underlying violence of capital economies. This cultural matrix is disrupted through strategies of chemical dissolution (Dillon) and copy generated error codes (Craig). Both approaches dissolve the boundary between self and other, and subject and object, to provoke slippages into smooth space. This space of osmotic fluidity allows the artists to transgress the everyday into an uncanny state of confusion – to implicate the viewer within the abject state of loss.
This exhibition brings a range of new and recent works by both artists, including printmaking and photography, performative, sculptural and installation elements to fuse a new whole between the artists and their various media. (Dis)Location is thought-provoking and visually disarming collection of works, and an experiment in collaboration between these two artists uniquely suited to the modular downstairs space of Perc Tucker Regional Gallery.
Exhibition Launch
6 - 8pm
Friday, 16 April 2021
Perc Tucker Regional Gallery
Image: Damian Dillon, (Dis)integration #5, 2019, unique C-Type print on Alupanel, 100 x 90 cm
Past Exhibitions - 2009-2021
Visit our past exhibitions here.
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