MELBOURNE, AUSTRALIA - The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia exhibits Howard Arkley until 25 Feb 2007.  Howard Arkley (1951 – 1999) was popularly conceived as the foremost painter of Australian suburbia.  The retrospective survey Howard Arkley opening at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia on 17 November will comprehensively survey the evolution of his career spanning three decades.  Howard Arkley will examine 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.

Howard Arkley will reveal the complexity of Arkley’s work from the early 1970s to the final major works he displayed at the Venice Biennale in 1999.  Frances Lindsay, Deputy Director, NGV said: “This retrospective of Howard Arkley’s work will assess and celebrate his singular contribution to the history of twentieth century Australian art.  “Arkley was a quiet but essential presence in the Melbourne art scene.  He was particularly influential on his peers and on a younger generation of artists with whom he interacted as a teacher and mentor.”

Using a range of techniques from the commercial airbrush to conventional artists’ tools, Arkley’s work attracted and balanced professional and popular appeal.

Jason Smith, Curator Contemporary Art, NGV said: “For almost thirty years Howard Arkley produced some of the most idiosyncratic and iconoclastic art in Australia.  This retrospective will examine his developments of abstraction, the evolution of figuration and his particular domestic iconography, and the continual tension between representational and abstracted images of the landscape, the home and suburbia that fuelled his imagination.”

Whether it is the suburban dreams of home ownership or the aesthetics of modernist furniture and architecture, Arkley’s paintings, painted sculptures and installations open a window onto dazzling images of Australian culture.  Howard Arkley is a National Gallery of Victoria Touring Exhibition and will tour to the Art Gallery of NSW from 10 March – 6 May 2007 and to the Queensland Art Gallery from 6 July – 16 September 2007.