All images © The Estate of Howard Arkley. Licensed by Kalli Rolfe Contemporary Art

Source: National Gallery of Victoria 

The singular vision of Australian artist Howard Arkley (1951-1999)
developed throughout a career spanning three decades. This
retrospective represents comprehensively the evolution of Arkley's
oeuvre from the early 1970s to the final major works with which he was
represented at the Venice Biennale in 1999.

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.