Yellow is the new Black:

Some Thoughts by Dr. Renée Gadsden on Brittany Tucker’s exhibition Canary

Brooklyn-born and Vienna-based Brittany Tucker (*1996) is an artist on a long and arduous journey — as we all are — but the difference is that we, the viewers, are allowed to accompany her path through her works of art. This series on display, painted in her preferred medium of oil and in her preferred style of quickly painting directly on the canvas without elaborate preparatory drawings or the use of a projector, was created specifically for her first solo show in the Roberta Keil Gallery in Vienna.

Tucker works swiftly and one senses, in an agitated way, which the canvases belie through their eerie stillness. The flat, broad strokes, and the reduced color palette (shades of black, white and gray) have a haunted quality, suggestive of storyboards of a Gothic, film noir or horror movie of the classic Hollywood era. Often Brittany Tucker vocalizes sensing “an impending feeling of doom.” Her canvases, in their Kafkaesque banality, invoke a thrilling sense of danger, heightened by the voyeurism we are forced to participate in because of her deeply personal subject matter. She seems to paint self-portraits of everyday moments. Or are the scenes that we are witnessing pipe dreams? Or nightmare sequences? Time and time again the “Self” portrayed is accompanied by an implacable bogeyman stick figure who alternately impedes, dominates, challenges and exasperates her day and night. Sometimes more than one appears, and there can be a female version. She calls this figure “The Character,” and he is in her phone, peers through her window, hovers over her shoulder, blocks her movements and oscillates between being a companion, teacher, bodyguard and jailer.

The ontological struggle that Brittany Tucker reveals in her works resonates strongly with the viewer. The paintings are steeped in emotion, and reflect quite accurately the mood of the zeitgeist. Brittany Tucker is not a prophet, but she is very much an authentic megaphone of her generation. She is willing to expose her suffering and fragility to our scrutiny, and hence the title of the exhibition: Canary. Tucker is referring to historic use of “the canary in the coalmine,” as well as of the well-known saying. The small yellow birds would be brought down into the dark mine shafts to alert the miners of the danger of invisible lethal gases. If the canary stopped singing and died, the miners knew they must evacuate quickly or perish themselves. Brittany Tucker is a modern-day canary in the coalmine, expressing alarm and discomfort in order to be of help to others. Her oeuvre emphasizes her credo that it is important to express one’s emotions, and documents how she carves out an existence of freedom inside the Russian doll of societal systems.

This current series of paintings is intimate yet intrepid, and reveals new approaches to the medium that she loves, oil paint. Her signature style is recognizable, but one sees how Brittany Tucker is pushing herself to shatter her own artistic boundaries and reach new levels of expressiveness and truth.

© Essay: Dr. Renée Gadsden, 2026