Jimmy Pike

Rebecca Hossack Gallery will be presenting a retrospective of paintings and drawings by Jimmy Pike (1940-2002), a celebrated aboriginal painter from Fitzroy Crossing in Western Australia. Pike’s work- like most Aboriginal painting- is concerned with the land, its sacred history and its present use. Jimmy Pike’s work is known and collected around the world, and included in all the principal Australian public collections.

The exhibition will be co-curated by Rebecca Hossack and Pike’s widow, the British-born environmentalist and writer Pat Lowe. It will focus on the need and the possibilities for collaboration between the Aboriginal world and the mining industry- and the many trail-blazing initiatives that have been taken in community and economic development by Rio Tinto.

The exhibition will include more than forty Jimmy Pike works including two 10-metre paintings of ghost gums, never-before exhibited carvings and some of jimmy’s latest canvasses, drawings of London and works from the Berndt Collection at the University of Western Australia.

Jimmy Pike grew up as a hunter-gatherer. Living as a fringe-dweller around Cherrabun Station, he eventually joined relatives at the station camp and worked as a stockman. He was named Jimmy Pike, after Phar Lap’s jockey, by a cattle station manager.

Pike learned to use western art materials while in Fremantle Prison. Even before he was released, his work was exhibited in major Australian galleries.

During a solo show at the Rebecca Hossack Gallery in 1991, Pike and his wife Pat Lowe along with Rebecca attended a garden party at Buckingham Palace where Pike met Queen Elizabeth II. He and Lowe later published a book about the experience, Jimmy and Pat Meet the Queen.