John Coburn was born in Ingham, Queensland in 1925. One of the most distinctive and spiritually engaged Australian artists of the twentieth century, he developed a visual language of bold, symbolic forms — suns, moons, trees, flames, and elemental forces — rendered in rich, resonant colour that drew equally on his Catholic faith, his study of Eastern philosophy, and the great traditions of decorative and sacred art. His work is immediately recognisable and entirely his own.
Coburn studied at East Sydney Technical College and later in Paris, where exposure to the European decorative tradition deepened his interest in pattern, symbol, and the relationship between art and sacred space. He is perhaps best known internationally for his two monumental tapestries — Genesis and Apocalypse — commissioned for the Sydney Opera House and unveiled in 1973, works that brought his symbolic visual language to one of the world’s great public buildings.
His prints Aftermath, Burning Land, and The Burning, produced in collaboration with Fred Genis, sit at the heart of his most characteristic preoccupations — fire, land, and the elemental forces that shape and destroy. The burning landscape is a subject with deep resonance in the Australian context, and Coburn brings to it both the urgency of direct cultural experience and the meditative weight of his spiritual practice. Lithography, with its capacity for warm, saturated colour and bold graphic form, suited his visual language with great naturalness.
Coburn was a member of the Sydney Printmakers and exhibited widely throughout Australia and internationally across a long and distinguished career.
John Coburn died in Sydney in 2006. His work is held in every major Australian public collection.
