Australian painter, born in Sydney, where he studied at the Julian Ashton Art School, 1957–9. In 1960 he travelled to Europe on a scholarship and after a few months in Italy moved to London in 1961. At this time there was something of a vogue for Australian art in Britain and he quickly achieved success: he won the international prize at the Paris *Biennale for Young Artists in 1961 and had his first one-man exhibition in 1962, at the Matthiesen Gallery, London. After spending a year and a half in New York and a year in Fiji, he returned to Sydney in 1970. Whiteley's work was based on the human figure but often came close to abstraction. His imagery was sometimes erotic or violent: in 1964–5, for example, he did a series based on the crimes of the infamous sex murderer Christie, who was executed in London in 1953.
Joan Miró’s painting The Hunter (Catalan Landscape) brings together the real and the imaginary, abstraction and figuration, and image and text in a way that would characterize much of his work to come. In the canvas—a landscape filled with personal symbols and evocations of life on his family’s farm in Montroig, Spain, such as a tree trunk sprouting a leaf and the eponymous hunter carrying a freshly killed rabbit—he rendered the everydayness of the farm with a poetic intensity. This impetus to reveal the marvelous in the quotidian attracted the attention of André Breton, the founder of… more