Quotes of the Day

Melbourne cup day 2006, and inside the National Gallery of Victoria, a different race is on. Already much of the work is out of its yellow starting boxes — one intriguingly marked mug pop — and seven years after the artist's death, the betting is that his retrospective, "Howard Arkley," will be a winner. Arkley's 25-year career connected comic strips and Conceptualism, Surrealism and suburbia, punk rock and Postmodernism — all with the zip of his airbrush, blurring the line between rarefied art and popular taste in the process. He was able to do this by painting the world most Australians know. In the final rooms of the exhibition — among canvases the size of billboards that seem to advertise domestic life in hues nothing less than electric — curator Jason Smith rides the theme that will surely take his show across the finish line. "Suburbia is our landscape," he says. "We build it, we live in it, we grow up in it. Our lives are conducted here. This is the landscape that conditions us, whether we like it or not."

In helping turn the gaze of Australian painting away from the bush and toward the urban fringe where, as he put it, "Ninety-five percent of Australians actually live," Arkley was right on the money. And at the time of his death in 1999 aged 48, there were no limits to what he seemed capable of achieving. His color-saturated screens of suburban living rooms unfolded triumphantly around the Australian pavilion at the Venice Biennale; just opened was his first sell-out show in Los Angeles; and a new series of freeway paintings was in the works, suggesting infinite possible directions for his art. Then came Arkley's drug overdose in his Melbourne studio. And in the intervening years, the emotions left by his tragic death — as well as the usual art-market maneuvering — colored the public perception of him. Curator Smith believes there is a "a respectful distance now," and what his exhibition and John Gregory's accompanying book offer is a perfectly timed take on the last great Australian artist of the 20th century.

A senior lecturer in art and design at Monash University, Gregory also happens to be the brother-in-law of Arkley's widow, Alison Burton, and Carnival in Suburbia: The Art of Howard Arkley (Cambridge University Press; 214 pages) benefits from intimate access to the artist's studio archive. Here, an entry gleaned from one of his student notebooks — "I offer the following as an example of my state of mind... hint: there could be something that at first seems false. but things are never what they seem" — could be a useful guide for visitors to the retrospective, which opens this week. Seeing Arkley isn't as easy as his work makes it look. His distinctive "after-spray" outlines over fields of kinetic patterning and color constantly tempt the eye to shift focus; figurative becomes abstract and vice versa; painting and sculpture merge.

Having sent an Arkley kitchen canvas to Korea in a 1998 show and worked with him on an installation shortly before his death, Smith knows him inside out. Hanging the exhibition in loose chronological order, he places the 1992 painted interior, Spartan Space, inspired by Modernist De Stijl furniture design, amidst early white abstract works, making plain Arkley's influences. In the following room, he artfully arranges a 1983 suite of street-culture canvases, Tattooed: Head, Hands, Penis, Feet, in the form of a Surrealist game of Exquisite Corpse, making the connection to Arkley's student days at Prahran College.

Next he allows visitors to walk through the artist's 1991-92 collaboration with burlesque painter Juan Davila, to give an idea of his contemporaries. And in the final spaces, he provides the breadth of a suburban street for surveying Arkley's crowning canvases of the '90s, such as the almost radioactively-charged Family Home: Suburban Exterior, 1993, which made him justly famous. Along nearly 20m of nearby wall are hung the larger-than-life vignettes of suburban lounge rooms, many drawn from earlier works, which played like his Greatest Hits at Venice. Here, to walk before his Vulcan gas heater set on its throne of crazy paving is to feel the heat of a painter on fire. It's a show filled with prickly sensation.

For those who can't wait for its tour of Sydney and Brisbane next year, there's Gregory's cleverly designed large-format book — as blocky as one of Arkley's hand-sprayed chairs. He'd surely approve. As his studio notebooks — and disco-colored De Stijl installation Muzak Mural-Chair Tableau, 1980-81 — attest, Arkley's vision couldn't be contained by the gallery wall. At various times he envisaged a home handyman show, inspired by the hardware stores near where he lived in suburban Oakleigh, and even started to design his own limited-edition furniture and crockery. Arkley was only half tongue-in-cheek, and what makes his work so likeable is the democracy of spirit that puts the tenets of high Modernism to such witty use.

In this sense he was as close in spirit to Keith Haring as he was to Klee, and if the book has a fault, it's that it stints on his formative punk years in the '70s and '80s, assuming everyone has read Ashley Crawford and Ray Edgar's Spray: The Work of Howard Arkley (1997). As they documented, it was his 1981 mural Primitive, named after a song by The Cramps, that saw Arkley paint his way from an abstract to a figurative style. Perhaps it was his life-long love of doodling that drew him to the airbrush, but this isn't something the new book makes clear. Instead, Gregory (and Smith in the show) bring new insights to Arkley's work by exploring the carnival theme. From his Zappo heads to his aborted 1985 exhibition of masked portraits to his fluoro rendition of the Prince of Darkness, Nick Cave, 1999, Arkley was forever fascinated by the masks people must wear.

In this way, his vaudevillean scenes of suburbia are the ultimate self-portraits, their bright exteriors hinting at shadowy, unknowable lives that the viewer can only guess at. In Arkley's case it was a long-term heroin addiction, which finally claimed his life. But his surviving work asks us to leave our final judgment open, which is what distinguishes him from that more cynical chronicler of the everyday, John Brack. Instead, we are left with a glimmer of mirth, irony perhaps, but not least of all affection for what takes place behind the masquerade of suburban life.

• Michael Fitzgerald
• Even when he seemed only to be playing with color and form, Howard Arkley's great theme was Australian suburban life