Tony Slater: Twenty Paintings for Trying Times

The genesis of Tony Slater’s work comes directly from the second generation of British Pop school artists, 1960s London. In considering that broader context, Slater’s oeuvre begins to fall into place. His work originates from an international idiom that was upending the European modernist aesthetic, a framework which explains his constantly moving output, a restlessness of spirit that sees his work shift from figurative, landscape and urban scenes to highly satirical commentary. Yet, his unflinching approach to pictorial structure is also one of his many strengths.

Slater is one of those artists for whom the importation of international ideas from London, rather than America, is central, foregrounding his significance at key moments in Australian art history. This transnationalism is in a similar vein to the Central Street Gallery artists living in Ladbroke Grove in the early 1960s, who imported ideas of the new abstraction—a direct transfer from London to Australia in 1966 with the opening of Central Street Gallery. It can be argued that Slater’s graphic, flat surfaced figurative works from 1968 through to 1973 subsequently infiltrated and circulated within the Sydney art scene and perhaps exerted an influence through their transmission.

Slater’s arrival in Australia in 1974 signalled a new era for the artist. He had no intention of staying; rather, he came to reconnect with lifelong friends, including the artist Peter Upward (1932–1983), with whom he had become close while Upward was living in London. In coming to Australia, he wanted to make a clean break from London and was searching for ways of living outside the art world. He travelled extensively, getting to know this new visual environment. While hitchhiking through Far North Queensland, he happened to purchase “a bottle of ink and a sketchbook” and began “making notes of the visual memories of the day’s travelling.” The art world had summoned him once again and Australia was the place where he felt he belonged.

Slater settled in Stroud, a small town north of Newcastle, where he continues to live and paint. Without the usual accoutrements of modern life—the internet, email and mobile phone—a solitary existence allows him time to think and paint in the studio undisturbed.

Born in 1940 in Derbyshire, England, Slater grew up on his parents’ farm. He very much identified as a farm boy. At the age of thirteen, he was enrolled at the Joseph Wright Secondary School of Art in Derby, a formative experience that laid the foundations for his artistic development. In 1957, he attended the Derby School of Art. He recalls, “I didn’t do the HSC (Higher School Certificate); I wanted to go to the art school instead.”

After graduating, he progressed to the Royal College of Art (RCA) in 1960, studying there at the same time as artists David Hockney (1937-2026), Derek Boshier (1937–2024) and Allen Jones. At the RCA, he witnessed a decisive shift in the zeitgeist of painting. This new generation of artists disrupted and challenged the authority of the institution’s more senior and conventional instructors within the painting school. This situation had an impact on Slater: “The demolition of what I thought I was as a painter, the power of my peers the year above me, the main components of the Pop school, got under my skin. I couldn’t ignore what they were doing.”

By 1968, with his departure from the RCA, Slater pursued his own path in the creation of those Pop-derived, figurative paintings. Bold flatness, with high angles, sharp contours, soaring curvilinear swirls, motion upwards and downwards. These largely experimental works have, in some respects, circled back around to his current figurative paintings. An exalting source of inspiration, as Slater recalls, was “the powerful presence of Francis Bacon (1909-1992).” Bacon’s studio was being renovated at the time. “I ended up working side by side with him. It became obvious we were not kindred souls.”

The importance of pictorial structure, or as Slater describes, “pictorial architecture,” lies at the core of his approach to painting. This stems from hard looking at Georges Seurat’s Bathers at Asnieres, 1884, which he encountered at The National Gallery when he was living in London. “Bathers never left me; his early work steered my interest in the figure.” The other source he fervently studied was Nicolas Poussin’s (1594-1665) The Inspiration of the Poet, 1629-30, a folio in sepia in which, for Slater, the structure was evident. Slater adheres to a vigorous working process, drawing twice weekly and working in the studio daily. He stays true to the drawing; changes in the transfer are kept to a minimum. He manages a complex construction process that can at times involve “painting, changing, painting, repainting, sometimes scraping and starting again.” In Someone Else’s Odalisque, 2025, Slater’s unintentional nod to Henri Matisse (1869-1954), the nude enfolds within what appears to be an anthropomorphic cavern. Nature and the forms of the female figure entwine into an upright and poised fifth ballet position. The painting runs parallel to his magnificent work Anthropomorphic Landscape, 2024. The architectural contours evident in this work sharpen the visual dynamism within the picture plane, where the abstraction slices through in unexpected ways. Generally, Slater’s paintings defy any necessary decoding; they are more enigmatic than giving over to a set narrative or meaning.

Slater’s return to the figurative was a turning point in his oeuvre. He tells me, “My abrupt return to realism was an attempt to describe what I was seeing rather than the production of a painting, so I became, in my own mind, a painter of things.” These works are not intended to be read or analysed; rather, interpretation is open-ended: there is no one way of looking at his paintings. Akin to film stills, the figures are often paused in arresting time and place, allowing us to observe repetition and the mundane, set within an eerie, still atmosphere.

Slater’s modus operandi is looking intently, absorbing the world at large. He is unable “to keep it [the world] at bay; it always intrudes into my work.” One of his most recent works, Conspiracy Theory, 2025, depicts a gathering of unsavoury characters bunched at the base of a spiral staircase, like an interrogative surveillance team. Its surreal, sculptural quality echoes aspects of Giorgio de Chirico (1888-1978) in its construction. It sets the stage for a barking dog to always be present-a powerful painting that is a visual provocation questioning global instability. Tony Slater has no illusions about the art world; he remains faithful in his lifelong pursuit of pictorial structure, a commitment that continues to distinguish the brilliance of his work.

Rhonda Davis, Extract from her essay in Artist Profile Issue 75, May 2026