Known as Brocky or Peter Perfect, Peter Brock is a motor racing icon. As well as three Touring Car Championships and nine wins at Sandown, he won Australia's premier motorsport event, the Bathurst 1000, a record nine times, earning him the title ‘King of the Mountain’. The Bathurst race winner's trophy has been named after him since his death, at age 61, in a rally accident in 2006.
Artist Peter Kendall played with several concepts for this 2004 Archibald Prize painting of Brock before deciding to bring his portrait painting together with his abstract and conceptual art for the first time.
‘I didn’t plan it; his personality demanded it,’ said Kendall. ‘The picture needed power and energy in it. It’s a running joke that I use a lot of red but there was no analytical approach, it was just that it suited his nature and his presence. It just demanded the red and that big black stroke.’