Robert Jacks represents one of Australia’s most esteemed and distinctive abstract artists. From selling out his first solo exhibition in 1966, spending ten-years on a self-described ‘international internship’ in New York and Canada through to a major retrospective at the National Gallery of Victoria in 2014, Jacks’ spent a lifetime fine-tuning his visual language.

When Jacks was in art school, Spain featured in the creative imagination. There was interest in Spanish artists like Picasso, Miro and Dali, and several Australian artists had recently moved there. Jacks recalled that one was John Olsen, who returned "cooking paella and perpetuating the Spanish mystique”. Simultaneously, Jacks was compulsively listening to Miles Davis’s 1959 album ‘Sketches of Spain’; in a twist of serendipity, he would go on to befriend Davis’s son, a fellow artist, in New York.

Late in his career, Jacks decided to return to this Spanish-infused time. He put Davis’s album back on and “was off”, creating works like this original screenprint. It is inspired by Jazz, the sultry Mediterranean and Picasso’s cubist guitars, a rush of freshness and style in a pop of citrus. For collectors of Jacks, abstract art and interiors in need of a lift, take a trip with 'Spanish Suite 9'.

Robert JACKS (1943 - 2014)
'Spanish Suite 9' 2001
screenprint on paper
Edition of 40
Image Size: 69 x 50 cm
Dimensions: 76 x 56 cm
Signed: Numbered, signed 'Jacks' and dated in margin
Comes with Letter of Provenance
Printed by master printmaker Larry Rawlings, embossed with printers stamp.

A complete folio of the Spanish Suite is represented in the collection of the National Gallery of Australia, accession number: 2008.94.144.1-10
 
Condition: Excellent
 
(c) Robert Jacks / Copyright Agency