Lot 13

Tolarno Galleries, Melbourne
Private collection, Melbourne

Howard Arkley: White + Black: 20 Years Work on Paper and Canvas 1975 - 1995, Tolarno Galleries, Melbourne, 1-30 September 1995, cat. no. 35 (sold $4800)

Gregory, J., Arkley Works: Howard Arkley Online Catalogue Raisonne, https://www.arkleyworks.com/blog/2009/11/28/black-and-white-icon-1995-wp/

Howard Arkley's subjects broadly extend from suburban houses and freeway overpasses, to cacti plants and portraits. Masks, Zappo heads and various faces are visible in the portraits by Howard Arkley, all with the potential to be viewed as expressions of the artist himself.
By 1990, he was exhibiting his 'heads' with Tolarno and his notebooks of this time reveal his scribbles of ideas for further heads - 'dead head, origami head, wet head, face break down, face with illness, own face' and many more. Between these written musings and his vast array of collected material, it is evident that this was a series that Arkley saw a large and important body of work eventuating from. All of these portraits were linked to Arkley's own persona. His 1990 Tolarno exhibition explored different titles, including "Looking for a likeness/My personal ID kit" indicating that Arkley saw himself adopting different disguises or masks. Transformation, transgression and the destabilising of boundaries were all prevalent in his studies of human faces .
In Black and White Icon 1995, the same icon head is utilised here as in other works by Arkley from the mid-1990s. Arkley portrays a prophet-like figure, drawing inspiration from an unknown Byzantine icon, as a reflection of himself. Arkley collected a vast array of material, from a widespread range of sources so it is possible he was appropriating a Byzantine work. Whilst at times we can understand why a particular image captured his interest, on many occassions we are left wondering. It is how Arkley studied, modified, adapted, and assembled these image sources that distinguishes his style.
By the time of his 1995 Tolarno exhibition, Howard Arkley was known for his use of bright colour and suburban subject matter. Rather than focusing solely on this as a determinant of commercial success, he revisited his monochromatic approach of the 1970s, acknowledging the importance of black and white throughout his career, but this time in conjunction with figuration rather than abstract mark making. In addition, in Black and White Icon from this exhibition, we now see Arkley's use of pattern in full flourish. Arkley was particularly 'pattern-conscious', often drawing upon the patterning of ornate wrought-iron gates and doorways, fabric designs, clothing, wallpaper, knitting patterns and tiles to recycle and revert their position as non-art. Here he has taken a paper or lace doily pattern, and used his iconic aerosol method to transfer this everyday pattern onto the sheet. It is at first a domestic, suburban and even decorative pattern although this is exactly Arkley's purpose - to "highlight both the ubiquity and inescapability of the decorative in daily life, and the merging of art and décor. However, more than this, the utter flatness of the pattern, at odds with the perspectival nature of the figurative elements, sets up the potential for slippages between the 2nd and 3rd dimension, abstraction and representation, and the real and the staged" .
The work of Howard Arkley involves the appropriation and amalgamation of ideas and images, from a vast selection of resources compiled by the artist. Black and White Icon 1995 is an important portrait by Arkley, utilising a repeated icon of Byzantine origins as a self-portrait, against one of the artist's 'pattern-conscious' backgrounds. With only a few of the works on paper from this 1995 Tolarno exhibition recorded and identified, this rare work is now finally being showcased to the public once again and available to Arkley collectors.

Olivia Fuller
Head of Art


Fitzpatrick, A., Lynn V., Howard Arkley and Friends, Tarrawarra Museum of Art, Victoria, 2015, p. 18
Ibid. p. 14

© Courtesy of the artist's estate and Kalli Rolfe Contemporary Art