Jan Senbergs was born in Riga, Latvia in 1939. He came to Australia as a refugee after the Second World War, settling in Melbourne where he would become one of the most significant and intellectually engaged painters of his generation. His experience of displacement, exile, and arrival in a new country left a permanent mark on his art — work that is dense, layered, and charged with both personal and cultural memory.
Senbergs studied at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology and developed a visual language of considerable complexity — combining gestural abstraction with fragments of text, map-like structures, and imagery drawn from history, politics, and the experience of migration. His paintings and prints feel like documents of a restless, searching mind, surfaces accumulated over time rather than resolved in a single sitting. There is always more to find the longer one looks.
His two prints produced in collaboration with Fred Genis — Best Wishes Fred from Jan (1987) and Landscape for Lona(1987) — are among the most personally inscribed works in the collection. The first, dedicated directly to Fred, carries the warmth of a friendship expressed through the act of making. The second, Landscape for Lona, suggests an equally personal dedication — a landscape made for someone loved, given the weight and tenderness that only a print can carry.
Both works were produced at the Kenthurst studio.
Senbergs was appointed a Member of the Order of Australia in 2000. His work is held in every major Australian public collection including the National Gallery of Australia and the National Gallery of Victoria.
Jan Senbergs continues to live and work in Melbourne.
