... increasingly less realistic for many. Arkley's specific visual style involved exploring the relationship between the real and the model, between utility and decoration, and between the elevated and the commonplace. Arkley's pieces feature houses, furniture, decorative schemes and optically turbulent patterns, which draw on both his interests in architecture and his social concerns. The retrospective examines the influences that inspired Arkley - punk music, the club scenes of the 1970s and 1980s, fashion, feminism and masculinity, and the volatile art world itself. The show surveys Arkley's work through his early-career abstract pieces, through the development of figuration and iconography; and the tension between representational and abstracted images of the landscape, the home and suburbia that fuelled his imagination and lines of sight. For almost 30 years, Howard Arkley produced some of the most idiosyncratic and iconoclastic art in Australia. Using a range of techniques from the commercial airbrush to conventional artists' ...

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