Born Melbourne, 1984, lives and works in Melbourne
While studying fine art at the Victorian College of the Arts, Melbourne, Alasdair McLuckie found himself drawn backwards from the idealised notional western historicisation of the avant-garde, towards what he understood as a more honest path to art, through folk narrative and ‘primitivism’ (while being simultaneously fascinated by its heady influence on early modernism). The subsequent development of McLuckie’s distinctive, obsessive and symbolic visual language is adopted from the disciplines of rudimentary craft and self-taught bead-work, and he equates its process-driven nature to seasonality, cycles and attendant fertility rituals. Accepting the term neo-primitivism as “loose and inaccurate, but inescapable”, his diverse media practice consists of sequences of cyclical bead paintings, collections of vintage ‘West German’ pottery dressed with beadwork skirts, low-relief drawings/ sculptures carved from book-binders’ card, collage-topped-tables, stark wall paintings.
His distinctive, exotic – quixotic, even – work has garnered significant curatorial interest in Australia; his first solo exhibition is represented in the collection of MONA, Hobart, Tasmania. His work is also in the private collection of Ten Cubed, where an evolving top ten selection of contemporary artists is collected and exhibited in depth over a ten year period. Recent activities include solo presentations at Alaska Projects, Sydney (2018), Bus Projects, Melbourne (2017), Ten Cubed, Melbourne (2016), Artspace, Sydney (2016) and Siegfried Contemporary, London (2015). In addition to residencies at the International Studio and Curatorial Program, New York (2015), Artspace, Sydney (2016), and The Young, Wellington (2016), McLuckie’s work has been featured in the survey exhibitions Future Primitive, at Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne (2013) and Melbourne Now at the National Gallery of Victoria (2013). McLuckie is the recipient of the Art in Australia / Credit Suisse Contemporary Art Award (2012), and Qantas SOYA Visual Art Award, (2013). In 2021, he was shortlisted as a finalist for the Ramsay Art Prize administered by the Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide. McLuckie’s first solo exhibition with mother’s tankstation, The Birth of Form, opened in February 2017 in Dublin.