John Brack: A Retrospective Exhibition

Born in 1920, John Brack as a young man wanted to be a poet. This interest in literature, particularly the novels of Henry James and the poetry of T.S. Eliot, W.H. Auden and Rainer Maria Rilke formed Brack’s analytical approach to painting. Serving from 1940 to 1945 as an Artillery Officer in the War [a source of his most recent Pencil Studies in which pencils are arranged in famous battle formations], Brack later attended the National Gallery School, Melbourne, from 1946 to 1949.

His first professional exhibition was in 1969 from which the National Gallery of Victoria acquired the painting The Barber’s Shop, 1952. Brack’s First group of works of the mid-1950s were concerned with the theme of small businesses and life in suburbia. They culminated in the social commentary of his city works; Marie’s War 1953, The Bar 1954 and Collins Street, 5pm, 1955. Analytical and anti-Romantic in approach, Brack cuts through the fashions of art. His choice of subject matter speaks to visual ambiguities and incongruities in the banalities of everyday life to emphasize the unusual in the usual. In the Shop Front Window Series, Brack manipulated reflections with the anomalies of inside and outside imagery. Intimate occasions and personal communications, ritualised under a spotlight as public ceremonies are the inspiration for the Wedding Series of the 1960s and the Ballroom Dancing Series of the 1970s. John Brack has always looked toward historical European Art and its traditions, reworking classic genres (history painting, still life and flower painting, the nude) into contemporary suburban imagery.