The Australian 80s – Ken Done

As Jenny Kee and Coogi were to fashion, so was Ken Done to Australian art in the 1980s. Scorned by the critics and adored by the masses – including a 14 year old me, happily snapping up a Ken Done T-shirt on a trip to Sydney – Ken Done became a multi-millionaire (inter)national celebrity.

His work adorned mugs, Tshirts, cars, postcard books and in a particularly spectacular coup, every single cover of the influential Japanese womens magazine, Hanako.

His images were bright, breezy, celebrating Sydney, its harbour and its opera house and portraying the city as a naive wonderland where it was always Summer and the living was easy. Again, it was a point of view that lost currency quickly in the more cynical 90s when Ken Done’s work fell out of the limelight.