Author(s): Kirsty Grant

Artists & Styles

The sixty-year career of Robert Jacks, one of Australia's most significant abstract artists, reveals continued development and change as well as a remarkable consistency of language and form. Jacks charted a distinctive and influential path through late twentieth- and early twenty-first century Australian art, and through his commitment to abstraction established himself as a unique figure in the history and development of art in this country. Robert Jacks: Order and Variation is a handsomely illustrated publication that surveys the artist's work, from his student years in the 1950s and 1960s to his monumental late paintings and sculptures. Featuring insightful essays by National Gallery of Victoria curators Kirsty Grant and Beckett Rozentals and art historian Peter Anderson, it conveys a new understanding of Jacks's exploration of abstraction in painting, sculpture, drawing and printmaking.