The University of Queensland's Brisbane Customs House art gallery will host a retrospective exhibition of 70 works by Queensland's Archibald Prize-winning artist, Ray Crooke.
Brisbane Archbishop the Most Rev. Peter Hollingworth will open the exhibition, entitled North of Capricorn: The Art of Ray Crooke in the presence of the artist on Saturday, June 13.
Organised by the Perc Tucker Gallery in Townsville, the exhibition has been shown in Townsville, Cairns and Rockhampton. Brisbane will be the first capital city venue, with the exhibition continuing until July 26 before going to Sydney, Canberra and Melbourne.
University Art Museum director Ross Searle, who assisted in developing the exhibition, said Ray Crooke was renowned for his vibrant paintings of the people and places of northern Australian and the South Pacific.
'Born in Melbourne in 1922, Ray Crooke is one of the best-loved of Australian artists who have travelled and worked in the tropics, and this is the first exhibition to cover his entire career,' Mr Searle said.
Fellow artist James Gleeson said Ray Crooke first visited the old frontier and mining towns of Cape York, and Australia's northern-most town, Thursday Island, as a 21-year-old serviceman during World War II. The light, the color, the indigenous people and the history of these places made a tremendous impression on him.
In 1949 at the age of 27, Crooke returned to the north and lived among Thursday Islanders and at Moa Island, an outer Torres Strait Island. Towards the end of his Torres Strait stay, Crooke signed on for eight weeks as a diver on a trochus lugger working the reefs scattered throughout the strait.
Crooke's early experiences in the Torres Strait have inspired many paintings in the exhibition, including Sit down dance (circa 1958-59) Trochus divers (circa 1960) and Federal Hotel, Thursday Island (1960).
The University of Queensland has loaned an oil painting to the exhibition (White Hibiscus, 1961), purchased for the University's art collection in 1962.
The University has also supported publication of a full-color exhibition catalogue. It contains essays and accounts of Crooke's life by The Courier-Mail art critic Sue Smith, who curated the collection, and artists Russell Drysdale and Daryl Lindsay.
Exhibition sponsors also include the Townsville City Council, the Gordon Darling Foundation, the Myer Foundation, the Queensland Arts Office, Mr Peter Purcell, The Courier-Mail, ABC Radio, Australian Air Express, Cairns Regional Gallery, the Regional Galleries Association of Queensland and Redleg Art Equipment Trucks and Crating.
For further information, contact Mr Searle, telephone 07 3365 3046.
