Sydney World Pride 2023 - Luke Thurgate: Adore You

As part of the National Art School’s 2023 Queer Contemporary and Sydney WorldPride programming, artist Luke Thurgate has created the large-scale mural drawing, Adore You.

Spanning three walls of the Drawing Gallery, and taking a painstaking six weeks to create, Adore You explores notions of desire, hero-worship, and queer subjectivity, taking inspiration from the 15^th Century polyptych Ghent Altarpiece by Hubert and Jan van Eyk.

Luke Thurgate is an artist and educator based in Sydney. He teaches drawing and painting at the National Art School, where he is currently completing his Master of Fine Art. Luke has an extensive exhibition history including recent exhibitions at Backwoods Gallery, Burra Regional Art Gallery, National Art School and Adelaide Central Gallery. He was a finalist in the 2019 Dobell Drawing Prize, the 2020 Tom Bass Figurative Sculpture Prize and the 2020 Jacaranda Acquisitive Drawing Award.

Luke’s multi-disciplinary studio practice explores the construction and deconstruction of ​‘identity’ in relation to masculinity, sexuality, romance and fear. His current work uses the monster as a surrogate ​’other’ to explore tensions between parody and sincerity, menace and pathos, vulnerability and power. Luke’s work borrows from a range of sources, including popular culture, pornography, and queer history.

The artist will be on site making this work on Wednesdays and Saturdays, 2 – 5pm.