Pope Alice Saves Nico

Set inside a moody, Van Gogh’s Night Café, this work stages an imagined encounter between Pope Alice and Nico of The Velvet Underground. Drawing on a story told by Pope Alice's alter-ego, the artist Luke Roberts (in which he recalls seeing Nico perform in Amsterdam in the early 1980s and catching her as she fell in a doorway), the painting transforms that fleeting moment into a mythic tableau.

Nico is cradled in Pope Alice’s arms in a pose that echoes Michelangelo’s Pietà, merging punk music folklore with religious iconography and queer mythology. The scene folds together romance, collapse, salvation, and the precarious edge between glamour and ruin. Through saturated colour, theatrical lighting, and skewed perspective, the painting reimagines a brush with real life as a symbolic drama of temptation, destruction, care, and transcendence.

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Toby is an Australian painter. Working primarily in oil, he blends the luminosity and atmospheric depth of Australian Impressionism with contemporary figurative fragments to explore place, identity, and the emotional residue of history. His paintings often draw from the light-scorched coasts and hinterlands of Queensland, inflected with subtle echoes of European modernism and classical forms.

Toby holds a PhD in Art History from the University of Queensland, where his research focused on Australian modernism and the avant-garde magazine Angry Penguins. His academic background informs his visual practice, bringing a deep awareness of art-historical lineage, narrative, and the psychological charge of images. Alongside painting, he lectures in art history and theory at university and collaborates with leading contemporary artists on installation and artwork creation.

His paintings are held in private collections across Australia, and his practice extends across studio painting, archival research, and collaborative contemporary projects.