Curator Statement
Sunbakers II captures even more than those first T-shirts. Max Dupain’s famous photograph of a sunbather at Bondi Beach was the starting point for Ken’s rearrangement of the icons on a shrieking yellow slate that anticipates Apple’s Mac desktop by many years. The casual out-of-square symmetry of the bathers against the yellow sand reinforces Australia’s informality, where all citizens are equal - especially on the beach. The title is a sly pun on baking buns and the Australian passion for cooking our backsides in the sun, although now the Cancer Council, sunblock manufacturers and the skincare industry have made us more aware of the downside of living sunnyside up. It is one of my favourite paintings and it hangs in my house in Los Angeles.
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