Jan Senbergs arrived in Australia at the age of ten, after fleeing the turmoil on World War II in Latvia. With little formal training as a painter, Senbergs has exhibited regularly since the 1960s and has had major solo exhibitions at the Art Gallery of New South Wales (2008), Deakin University Art Gallery (2011) and the Australian Print Workshop (2012).

He has received deserved critical recognition throughout his impressive artistic career including numerous awards, fellowships and commissions, from the huge mural in the High Court of Australia in the 1970s to the prestigious posting as the Visiting Professor of Australian Studies at Harvard University in the late 1980s. Senbergs is the only Australian artist to receive this honour. [1]

Senbergs has developed a highly idiosyncratic vocabulary for depicting urban industrial cityscapes with almost map-like viewpoints as in Barcelona I 2001. This work was produced during Senbergs’ three month residency in Barcelona, proving to be a highly productive period for the artist.

In contrast to these works, subsequent to the artist return from America, Senbergs produced a body of works with haunting juxtapositions of dream-like imagery. The Realm at 4 am 1991 is a part of this menacing series of phantasmagorical paintings. Patrick McCaughey, who wrote a major tome on the work of Senbergs in 2006, expressed ‘The Realm at 4 am (1991), the best of these, demonstrates how Jan’s liberated post-American imagination created disturbing, anxious images, and indicates his enduring debt to surrealism.’[2]

Sources:
[1] Patrick McCaughey, Voyage and Landfall: The Art of Jan Senbergs, The Miegunyah Press, Melbourne, 2006
[2] Patrick McCaughey, Voyage and Landfall: The Art of Jan Senbergs, The Miegunyah Press, Melbourne, 2006, p.169 Categories: Australian & International Art