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Title

Triple fronted

1987

Artist

Howard Arkley

Australia

05 May 1951 – 22 Jul 1999

  • Details

    Other Title
    Triple-fronted
    Date
    1987
    Media category
    Painting
    Materials used
    synthetic polymer paint on canvas
    Dimensions
    166.4 x 238.4 x 4.7 cm stretcher
    Signature & date

    Singed l.r. verso on canvas, black fibre-tipped pen ".../ Howard Arkley".
    Dated l.r. verso on canvas, black fibre-tipped pen "...1987/ ...".

    Credit
    Mollie and Jim Gowing Bequest Fund 2014
    Location
    Not on display
    Accession number
    1.2014
    Copyright
    © The Estate of Howard Arkley, Courtesy Kalli Rolfe Contemporary Art

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    Artist information
    Howard Arkley

    Works in the collection

    2

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  • About

    'Triple fronted' is an iconic example of Howard Arkley's distinctive airbrush style. It demonstrates his preoccupation with the Australian urban landscape since the 1980s. The painting depicts the exterior of a suburban house made ultra-new and ultra-modern in its dayglo colours (Juliana Engberg, 1988). Yet beneath the dazzling finish, a sense of detachment permeates the image.

    Howard Arkley is renowned for his representation of the Australian suburbs; transmuting ordinary, everyday subjects into the extraordinary. Drawing upon the visual language of advertising and home decorating magazines, his work employs techniques and colour ranges of popular culture. It reveals his abiding fascination with pop art, underpinned by a sense of deadpan humour, irony and pathos.

    Beginning as an abstract painter in the 1970s, then turning to figurative painting in the 1980s, Arkley reconciled the two tendencies in his distinctive take on the suburban motif. Starting with preliminary rapidograph pen drawings, sourced from outmoded photos from glossy magazines or real-estate brochures, Arkley would outline the composition, project the crisply defined drawing directly onto the canvas, and then paint the broader areas in flat colour. Later he would tape smaller cut-outs or stencils onto the canvas, suggesting textures and patterns which became integrated into the overall picture.

    With their fuzzy, dreamlike quality and tonal after-effects, the airbrushed lines stylised the final look of the painting. The results were always exuberant: 'I like the fact that the imagery looks like it's printed; it looks like a reproduction of a painting, rather than a painting' (Arkley quoted by Ashley Crawford and Ray Edgar, 1997).

    The artist captured the Australian suburbs on canvas as a new zone of aesthetic inspiration. He transformed the suburban home into a new icon, suggestive of the soullessness of the Australian suburban sprawl, which became a defining feature of the Australian way of life with the post war spread of suburbia.

  • Exhibition history

    Shown in 5 exhibitions

  • Bibliography

    Referenced in 18 publications

Other works by Howard Arkley