JOHN COBURN Australian, B. 1925

Born in North Queensland in 1925, Coburn ranks among this country’s most respected senior artists. Recently he was honoured with a retrospective exhibition, John Coburn: Five Decades, at the S. H. Ervin Gallery in Sydney as well Lou Klepac’s beautiful 2003 monograph on his work. Coburn’s semi-abstract images are now among the most recognisable in Australian art. He is one of Australia’s leading tapestry designers, perhaps best known in that field for the vast Curtain of the Sun and Curtain of the Moon in the Sydney Opera House. His Seven Days of Creation series hangs in the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. Café Society, originally commissioned for the Hyde Park Café in Sydney, was woven at the Victorian Tapestry Workshop and reflects Coburn’s love of music and rhythm and the joy of life.

Since its inception in 1976, Coburn has produced more than twenty unique tapestries with the Victorian Tapestry Workshop (VTW) – the largest and arguably most significant provider of public art in Australia. VTW tapestries are not produced in numbered editions – as were, for example, Coburn’s tapestries woven at Aubusson in France. The Victorian Tapestry Workshop is the only institution of its kind in Australia, and one of the very few in the world, able to undertake the weaving by hand of large-scale tapestries such as this.  Although its techniques date back to fourteenth-century Europe, the Australian workshop is unique in that all its weavers are trained artists themselves and, in collaboration with the designing artist, bring forth extraordinary dimensions of colour, texture and light in the finished work.