HOWARD ARKLEY Australian, 1951-1999

Acquired from the artist through Tolarno Galleries, Melbourne (label on the reverse)

Private collection, Melbourne

Howard Arkley, Recent Works, Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney, 15 June - 2 July 1983, cat. 3

Howard Arkley, Urban Paintings,Tolarno Galleries, Melbourne,1983

Ashley Crawford and Ray Edgar, Spray, The Work of Howard Arkley, Craftsman House, Sydney, rev. edn 2001, p. 59, illus.

In the words of his biographers Ashley Crawford and Ray Edgar, ‘In 1983 Arkley crashed through. After “POPISM”, and inspired by the success of Primitive, his work oscillated between figuration and abstraction… These diverse works, exhibited in Arkley’s 1983 solo show at Tolarno Galleries, include distinctive motifs that the artist would develop over the rest of his career’. Variant forms of the cacti ‘doodle’ and the leggy ‘figure’ appear in both Model and Zappo of the same year. ‘Numerous mass cultural influences, such as television and popular magazines, provided ongoing stimuli, as did imagery from childhood. What governs the work is an overriding concern with many Surrealist and Dada techniques: the exploration of automatic writing, drugs and found imagery’. ¹

Arkley was a larger-than-life figure in Australian art. With paintings held in all major Australian public collections, he represented Australia at the 1999 Venice Biennale. When he died in July that year, he had just had a sell-out exhibition in Los Angeles and seemed poised for international success. Yet Arkley always somehow managed to maintain his status as an edgy outsider; a member of no artistic group. His consistent use of airbrushed acrylic spray paint provided a deliberate distance from the canvas, but, at the same time, made his work instantly recognizable and uniquely his own. 

1. Spray, The Work of Howard Arkley, Craftsman House, Sydney, rev. edn 2001, p. 58.