Howard Arkley Australian, 1951-1999
“Ordinary houses are full of pattern. You go into a house, there’s no art … but it’s filled with a kind of second degree imagery – the patterning around the fireplace, on the curtains, in the carpet; and the different bricks on the different houses, and the pattern between the gutter, the nature-strip, the footpath, then you have the fence, then you have the lawn, the house, the tiles, then you have the beautiful sky… and I missed the bushes in between…it’s rich.” - Howard Arkley, 1999
Howard Arkley is widely recognised as the foremost painter of Australian suburbia. He rejected the landscape tradition, as the artist John Brack had beforehand, celebrating instead the ubiquity of images embedded in urban and suburban environments with his vibrant airbrushed paintings. His signature houses, domestic interiors and fascination with mass culture struck a powerful chord with contemporary Australians who readily identified with them.
-
Untitled (Ornamentik variant) , 1981Howard ArkleySynthetic polymer paint on canvas
200.0 x 120.0 cm, or, 120 x 200 cm.POAView more details -
Untitled (Cactoid Composition) , 1986Howard Arkleyfibre tipped pen on paper
Image Size: 48 x 73 cm$ 8,500.00
Dimensions: 49 x 74 x 2 cmView more details
Howard Arkley is widely recognised as the foremost painter of Australian suburbia. He rejected the landscape tradition, as the artist John Brack had beforehand, celebrating instead the ubiquity of images embedded in urban and suburban environments with his vibrant airbrushed paintings. His signature houses, domestic interiors and fascination with mass culture struck a powerful chord with contemporary Australians who readily identified with them. Suburban motifs, patterns and textures offered Arkley endless possibilities for abstract compositions which blurred the distinctions between High Art and Pop culture by referencing both art history and the everyday experience. Simultaneously serene and edgy, Arkley’s work creates an intriguing tension between the inherent beauty of suburbia and its darker more menacing side.
Howard Arkley is popularly conceived as the foremost painter of Australian suburbia. His signature houses and domestic interiors and fascination with vernacular, quotidian experience, however, were produced always in dialogue with his preoccupation with abstraction, patterning and the slide between two and three dimensions. Arkley’s paintings, painted sculptures and installations collapsed distinctions between abstraction and representation, and questioned certain utopian aspirations – whether it is the suburban dreams of home ownership or the functional design of modernist furniture and architecture. Arkley’s literally spectacular pictorial abstraction involves a slippage between the real and the model, between utilitarianism and decoration, and between the elevated and the commonplace.
Arkley’s visual lexicon of houses, furniture, decorative schemes and optically turbulent patterns drew on his abiding interests in the architectural and the sociological. This retrospective examines, in depth, the influences and milieu that inspired Arkley – punk music, the club scenes of the 1970s and 1980s, fashion, feminism and masculinity, and the volatile art world itself. The retrospective surveys Arkley’s work through the developments of abstraction early in his career, the evolution of figuration and iconographic register, and the continual tension between representational and abstracted images of the landscape, the home and suburbia that fuelled his imagination and lines of sight.
Howard Arkley was particularly influential on his peers and on a younger generation of artists with whom he interacted as a teacher and mentor. He was a quiet but essential presence in the Melbourne art scene. For almost thirty years he produced some of the most idiosyncratic and iconoclastic art in Australia. Using a range of techniques from the commercial airbrush to conventional artists’ tools, Arkley’s work attracted and balanced critical and commercial success, professional and popular appeal. This retrospective of Howard Arkley’s work assesses and celebrates his singular contribution to the history of twentieth century Australian art.
