Melbourne
Howard Arkley
National Gallery of Victoria

The spread of suburbia into the countryside after the housing shortage of World War II was an unmistakable fact of life in Australia as people sought more space. But the effects of 1950s conformity fermented in the psyche of everyone who inhabited those endless stretches of fibro, Laminex and cement boxes. Beyond the work of painter John Brack (1920-1999) and crossdressing comedian Barry Humphries, Australian suburbia has largely remained invisible to most artists who gravitated to, and thrived in, the city’s mean streets. To be modern was, by definition, to be metropolitan. Other artists, like Fred Williams, escaped to the bush to paint rural landscapes, or to the desert, as did Russell Drysdale and Sid Nolan.

While “serious” artists and designers ran away from suburbia, Howard Arkley (1951-99) embraced it with cover-the-earth rapture. And the pulsing after-effect of the new retrospective of Howard Arkley’s achievements, which kicked off in Melbourne at the National Gallery of Victoria and continues to Sydney’s Art Gallery of New South Wales and Brisbane’s Queensland Art Gallery, is like spending a day watching Looney Tunes from inside a lava-lamp. The exhibition surveys Arkley’s work from abstraction (patterning and repetition) early in his career, to figuration during his neo-primitive punk phase and, finally, to the suburban interiors and exteriors that became his signature style.

After completing art school in Melbourne, Arkley won a scholarship to Europe and the US. While living in Paris he photographed Art Nouveau and Art Deco doorways. Shortly after his return to Australia, while waiting one day for his mother to answer her doorbell, Arkley found himself focusing on the ornate patterning of her screen door. The aluminum grill and mesh were to inspire many of his later abstract paintings, evoking inner-eye whirligigs and fluorescent mind-lattices of psychedelia. He began then to systematically photograph streets of these flywire screen doors and the mass-produced pseudo-Modernist patterns on suburban garage doors, couch fabrics, and wallpaper.

Arkley also collected out-of-register color pages from old magazines, and pondered different ways of rendering woodgrain surfaces or rug designs with his eye-popping and zinging air-brush. Employing a matchless spray-gun technique, Arkley developed different styles or motifs: iridescent grids of dots resembling a cross between old computer print-outs and disco lights. He even painted these buzzing dots on a suburban Melbourne tram in 1980.

There was a hip generosity to Arkley’s celebration of suburbia. Balancing critical and commercial success, Arkley’s career also bridged generations, adding a Neo-Pop spirit to a moribund subject matter. He delivered a democratic vision in these paintings: a creative way of turning parental homes into trippy funhouses, or transforming stale real-estate into magical unreal-estate.

Two days after the 1999 Venice Biennale, where he exhibited The Home Show to worldwide acclaim, Howard Arkley, after struggling on and off with a drug habit, was found dead in his Melbourne studio from a heroin overdose.

- George Alexander