LN Tallur / India/South Korea b.1971 / Aurophobia – the fear of gold 2012 / Wood, iron, sawdust, industrial paint / 365 x 160 x 160cm (approx.) / Commissioned for APT7 and the Queensland Art Gallery collection / Purchased 2012. Queensland Art Gallery / Collection: Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art / © LN Tallur / Image: Courtesy of LN Tallur

LN Tallur
Aurophobia – the fear of gold 2012

Not Currently on Display

LN Tallur’s sculpture refers to the continuing power of gold as a symbol of wealth. For this work, the artist has shifted his attention from fear of money to the fear of gold. Historically, gold was the international guarantee of economic relations, and continues to be reserve currency around the world. Gold also constitutes shared territory between India and Australia – India is a major market for Australian gold, and its discovery in the nineteenth century generated the first major wave of Asian immigration to Australia.

Aurophobia – the fear of gold takes the form of a South Indian temple car, of the sort offered to the gods by wealthy devotees as a kind of status symbol. Its shape is a hybrid of traditional chariot forms and that of the Holtermann Nugget, the largest mass of gold ever found, unearthed in Hill End, New South Wales in 1872. Relief carvings around the base depict the history of gold mining in Australia.

Raised in rural India and not leaving the country until 1999, LN Tallur now lives in both India and South Korea and exhibits internationally. This movement has determined the unique character of his work, which is able to convey themes of humble values in a postindustrial world.

His large sculptural installations are a blend of traditional craftsmanship, complex technology and characteristically modest social critique. Physically striking and marked by a conceptual apparatus extending to the very substance of their materials — often a combination of the organic, the readymade, the industrial and the electronic — Tallur’s works are also distinguished by the fluency and freedom with which they employ traditional and contemporary Indian vernaculars.

Tallur’s versatility and acuity — his capacity to combine ancient and modern materials and convey sophisticated considerations with marked economy — has been attributed to the unusual geographical character of his background, education and lifestyle.