Title

John Brack retrospective.

Venues

Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia. (24 April 2009 – 9 August 2009)

Art Gallery Of South Australia. (2 October 2009 – 31 January 2010)

Date

(2009 – 2010)

Summary

Single-artist exhibition. Located: Australia (VIC, SA). Paintings, Drawings, Prints.

Curator

Grant, Kirsty

Country of context

Australia

Abstract

More than any other artist of his generation, John Brack (1920-99) was a painter of modern Australian life. Unlike his contemporaries, Brack painted neither myth nor history and when he focused on the landscape, it was the sprawl of suburbia that caught his attention rather than the ubiquitous Australian bush.

Brack has long been considered the quintessential Melbourne artist, a reputation which rests in no small part on the renown of his painting, Collins St, 5pm 1955. Today it seems more appropriate to view him as a distinctively Australian artist who, with a penetrating gaze and keen sense of irony, documented aspects of contemporary life in what have become some of the most iconic images of twentieth-century Australian art. More than depictions of familiar subjects however, Brack’s paintings are cerebral exercises which slowly reveal references to sources as diverse as the history of art and literature within complex layers of meaning.

His was an art of ideas that aimed to speak directly to the audience, grounded in the everyday but communicated through a distinctive and highly personal language, incorporating complex visual analogy, irony and humour, and always underpinned by a deep knowledge of the history of art.

This major retrospective, the first in more than twenty years, will survey John Brack’s complete œuvre, incorporating paintings, oil paintings, watercolours, prints, pen, ink and pencil drawings and etchings, from all of his major series. It will be the first time this great artist’s work has been staged in such a spectacular exhibition in Adelaide. [Gallery media, 2009]