In the 1970s and 1980s, Brett Whiteley’s paintings reflected popular media perceptions of the notion of an expressionist avant-garde artist as an intuitive intellect and tortured genius. Whitely was a prodigious talent, awarded first prize in the Young Painter’s section of the Bathurst Show at the age of 17, he attended the Julian Ashton School (1957-59) and travelled to London in 1960, remaining in England and then New York for ten years.
Read MoreHe exhibited at the Whitechapel and Marlborough Galleries and in the United States at the Pittsburgh International Carnegie Institute (1967). He returned to Sydney in 1969 and in the early 1970s established The Yellow House, an artists’ community in Potts Point. Whiteley’s paintings were often morally ambiguous and blatant in their sexual content, incorporating a diverse range of imagery and aesthetics. In the 1970s his painting seemed to epitomise the tastes of middle-class Australia, with a series of Matisse-inspired interiors, evoking an inviting decadent, Pacific paradise.
Whiteley is the only artist to have won all three major Australian art awards during his life; the Archibald, Sulman and Wynne Prizes. In 1991 he received the Order of Australia.
His work is represented in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York and National Gallery of Australia, Canberra.
