Historical information

This work was painted following Rob McHaffie’s Australia Council Residency at Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris in 2007. Despite Paris being a beautiful city, McHaffie also found the experience challenging and felt that on a bad day, the city was no more than an ornately decorated concrete jungle.
In this painting a monkey looks out from a green building onto an imagined scene abound with art historical references. A classical European figurative sculpture is surrounded by flowers from Monet’s gardens, while a contemporary sculpture by Franz West dominates the foreground of the work. McHaffie questions the so-called evolution of cultured humanity in comparison to the imagined contentedness of our pre-evolved species.

Physical description

oil on linen