Robert Jacks was one of Australia’s most significant abstract artists. His first solo exhibition in 1966 at Gallery A in Melbourne was a sell-out success. In a review of the exhibition, influential art critic Patrick McCaughey described Jacks as a distinctly new voice who signaled the arrival of the 1960s in Melbourne. Jacks left Australia for Toronto in 1968 and a year later moved to New York, where he lived for the next nine years. Jacks’s confidence as an artist grew throughout the 1980s, a decade in which the art market experienced a significant and sustained boom. He responded with a sequential series of major paintings, including his Metropolis series.