Word: arkley
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Melbourne cup day 2006, and inside the National Gallery of Victoria, a different race is on. Already much of the work is out of its yellow starting boxes - one intriguingly marked mug pop - and seven years after the artist's death, the betting is that his retrospective, "Howard Arkley," will be a winner. Arkley's 25-year career connected comic strips and Conceptualism, Surrealism and suburbia, punk rock and Postmodernism - all with the zip of his airbrush, blurring the line between rarefied art and popular taste in the process. He was able to do this by painting the world most...
...helping turn the gaze of Australian painting away from the bush and toward the urban fringe where, as he put it, "Ninety-five percent of Australians actually live," Arkley was right on the money. And at the time of his death in 1999 aged 48, there were no limits to what he seemed capable of achieving. His color-saturated screens of suburban living rooms unfolded triumphantly around the Australian pavilion at the Venice Biennale; just opened was his first sell-out show in Los Angeles; and a new series of freeway paintings was in the works, suggesting infinite possible directions...
...senior lecturer in art and design at Monash University, Gregory also happens to be the brother-in-law of Arkley's widow, Alison Burton, and Carnival in Suburbia: The Art of Howard Arkley (Cambridge University Press; 214 pages) benefits from intimate access to the artist's studio archive. Here, an entry gleaned from one of his student notebooks - "I offer the following as an example of my state of mind... hint: there could be something that at first seems false. but things are never what they seem" - could be a useful guide for visitors to the retrospective, which opens this...