Explosion

This painting extends the concerns that Howard Arkley pursued in his major 1986 painting Fast, and was commissioned by the telecommunications company Ericsson Australia. Arkley provided three designs to be translated into interchangeable ‘flip pads’ for Ericsson’s new range of mobile telephones. Arkley’s response to the commission reflected his fascination with design and popular culture and their influence on his work. As a discrete entity this work does not attempt to recreate the hallucinatory vortex of Fast, but provides an instructive model of his pursuit of abstraction and his brilliant use of interactive colour. Howard Arkley died in Melbourne in 1999, the same year that he represented Australia at the 48th Venice Biennale.

Text © National Gallery of Victoria, Australia