Abstracted Intersections: Robert Jacks, Anthony White & Michael Johnson

The title of the exhibition references, in part, Jacks’s ongoing exploration of the urban environment. Evolving from the grid paintings of the 1970s, the paintings of the 1980s continued the artist’s ruminations' on his experiences in New York, Sydney, and Melbourne. The paintings’ dominant geometric structures evoke city scapes where buildings, bridges, and roadways meld, coalesce, and disappear into each other creating inherently dynamic and rhythmic compositions.

In contrast to the monochromatic Metropolis series, the current selection of works is distinguished by bold yet harmonious colour arrangements. They reflect the artist’s visual response upon his return from New York to the colour-saturated environments of Sydney and Melbourne. Furthermore, Jacks’s visual vocabulary of urban infrastructures became richly supplemented with references to water, maritime transport, and sails.

Similarly to the Metropolis series, these works demonstrate the artist’s continuous exploration of painting techniques, and in particular his gradual transition in pigment application from brushes to palette knives. The resulting paintings feature engagingly textured and tantalisingly tactile surfaces. Delicate manoeuvring of the palette knife scrapes back the upper layers to reveal hidden harmonies of the layers beneath. These technical aspects complement the visual vocabulary of the paintings with references to the layered histories of the cities and places where Jacks had lived, and which continued  inspiring the painter’s ongoing series of artistic investigations.

Robert Jacks AO (1943-2014), painter, sculptor, graphic, conceptual, and installation artist, had exhibited widely from the 1960s, predominantly in Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane, New York and Toronto. He was the subject of important survey exhibitions at the University of Melbourne, ACCA, IMA Brisbane, and regional galleries of Castlemaine, Bendigo, McClelland, TarraWarra, Benalla, and numerous others, as well as the monumental survey, Robert Jacks: Order and Variation, which took place at the National Gallery of Victoria in 2014 and was accompanied by the publication of an important monograph on the artist.

Jacks’s works were included in a number of important curated exhibitions in Australia and abroad, most notably in the ground-breaking The Field, curated to inaugurate the new premises of the National Gallery of Victoria in 1968, and recreated in 2018 as The Field Revisited at the NGV Federation Square. The artist’s works reside in all Australian national and state galleries, numerous regional and tertiary collections, as well as the British Museum in London, Museum of New Zealand Te Pappa in Wellington, Wadsworth Atheneum, and other notable collections across Australia and abroad.