Howard Arkley

In collaboration with Kalli Rolfe Contemporary Art, 1301SW presents a major exhibition spanning Howard Arkley's diverse practice across painting, sculpture, installation, and works on paper. For three decades, Arkley produced some of Australia's most distinctive art, blending high and low culture, punk and pop, and abstraction and figuration. His iconic depictions of domestic spaces—both interior and exterior—reveal a deep fascination with the quotidian, rendered in bold patterns and vibrant colours that blur boundaries between fine art and popular culture. The exhibition draws from key moments in Arkley's oeuvre, including his sparse White Paintings and works on paper of the 1970s, influenced by philosophy, science, Eastern spiritualism, and masters of the monochrome. Highlights include the final work in Arkley's exterior house series and portraits of mass-media figures combining satire and playful parody. His furniture installation Homezone (1999) and Console (1999) merge ornamentation with abstraction, utilitarianism and decoration, bridging formal qualities of modernist movements with garish motifs of home interiors. Several pieces are shown in Sydney for the first time in nearly a decade.