Lot 29

The Estate of Larry Rawling

You Are Here, Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane, 5 - 28 November 1992 (another impression)
You Are Here, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne, 4 March - 4 April 1993 (another impression)
Icon Interior, Kalli Rolfe Contemporary Art, Australian National University Drill Hall Gallery, Canberra, 2001 (another impression)
Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne, 24 November 2001 - 17 February 2002, cat. no. 17 (another impression)
Juan Davila, Prints and Drawings 1980s - 2005, Kalli Rolfe Contemporary Art, Melbourne, 2005 (another impression)
Juan Davila and Howard Arkley: Masters of Contemporary Collaboration, Benalla Art Gallery, Victoria, 1 October - 20 November 2011 (another impression)

Gregory, J., Howard Arkley and Juan Davila: Icon Interior 1994-2001, Kalli Rolfe Contemporary Art, Melbourne, 2001, p. 5 (another impression)
Crawford, A., A Person Looks at a Work of Art...: The Michael Buxton Contemporary Australian Art Collection, Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne, cat. no. 17 (illus., another impression)
Gregory, J., Carnival in Suburbia: The Art of Howard Arkley, Cambridge University Press, Melbourne, 2006, cat. no. 5.12, p.149 (illus. p.152, another impression)
Gregory, J., Arkley Works: Howard Arkley Online Catalogue Raisonne, https://www.arkleyworks.com/blog/2009/12/08/interior-with-built-in-bar-1992-wp-howard-arkley-juan-davila/ (illus., another impression)

Juan Davila and Howard Arkley had an extensive collaborative partnership that evolved over many years and led to the production of three-dimensional installations, silkscreen prints, paintings and works on paper. Interior with Built-in Bar 1992 is a major screenprint collaboration that signifies a momentus shift in their partnership. Howard Arkley and Juan Davila's collaborations have made a significant impact on art history in Australia and demonstrated the possiblities of artistic partnerships that, until more recently, has been greatly underappreciated.
In 1992, Juan Davila was already well known for his sharp political paintings and Howard Arkley for his domestic interiors. Aesthetically, the work of Arkley and Davila did not typically speak the same language. While Arkley took a cleaner approach to his paintwork, and frequently drew upon appropriation and manipulation of existing images, Davila was far more gestural, with his work driven by political commentary and the mainstream media. In contrast, too, Arkley was more naturally inclined to accept the role of collaborator, as he had done previously, whilst for Davila it was new territory. The two artists continued to push the boundaries for each other, challenge eachother, right up to the point where ego would normally want to take over but there remained a harmony to the process.
Arkley and Davila presented their first major collaborative installation, Blue Chip Instant Decorator: A Room, at Tolarno Galleries in 1991. Shortly after this the pair created the original gouache, and resulting screenprint Interior with Built in Bar 1992, a work which demonstrates the union between the two and the balanced merging of their two artistic styles. The composition of Interior with Built in Bar displays picture frames lopsided and an inversion of floor to ceiling, reflecting Davila's vision of the interior whilst responding to Arkley's perspective. Interior with Built in Bar deliberately and successfully "blurs the signifiers of authorship" .
Arkley and Davila's Interior with Built-in-Bar 1992 was the final resulting collaboration between the pair, completed by Davila after Arkley's death. We can identify more than one author within the work, but the focus is not to be on who created what, but rather how the two hands at work responded to eathother's strengths and limitations as artists and collaborated in the truest sense of the word.

Olivia Fuller
Head of Art

Other impressions of this print are held in the permanent collections of the Benalla Art Gallery, Victoria; Buxton Contemporary, Melbourne; and National Gallery of Australia, Canberra.

RELATED WORK:
Howard Arkley and Juan Davila, Interior with Built-in-Bar 1992, gouache on paper with silkscreen detailing, diptych, 159 x 216cm (sheet, overall), Leonard Joel, Melbourne, 9 May 2022, lot 20.

© The Estate of Howard Arkley and Juan Davila, Courtesy Kalli Rolfe Contemporary Art