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Martin Sharp is widely recognised as Australia's foremost pop artist but his discerning insight into many of the social and cultural issues of our time reaches beyond artistic labels. Born in Sydney in 1942, Sharp first achieved international recognition in London in the 1960s. Echoing both social and artistic change, his groundbreaking posters became icons of the period. Today many of Sharp's images of Sydney have had such wide acceptance that they have become a part of the city's visual language. His career began during his student years at the National Art School when his cartoons were published in the Sydney Morning Herald, The Australian, Honi Soit and The Bulletin. In 1963 he joined forces with student newspaper editors Richard Neville (Tharunka) and Richard Walsh (Honi Soit) to produce the downtown publication Oz, a magazine of social satire which gave a voice to a younger generation with a scarifying sense of humour ...

Luna Park, Van Gogh, Ginger Meggs, Hokusai, Boofhead, Arthur Stace's 'Eternity' and Tiny Tim have been recurring images in Sharp's work. As he says, 'an artist is meant to reveal what is not obvious to people and work on it until it is'. The spirit of the Yellow House and its shared experience is part of the fabric of Sharp's Sydney house, Wirian where, on the eve of his survey show at the Museum of Sydney, I spoke with him about his life and work ...

CF: How do you explain the wide appeal of your work?

MS: We all have our different roles to play and I think mine is to present images and condense certain information which can be communicated on an individual or popular level. It's important for me to use images which everyone is familiar with so they have greater emotional content. I change the context because we've got to be able to see things on many levels. It's a way to help us comprehend a world that is multi-layered and very complex.

CF: In London you established an international reputation quite independently of the gallery system. How did that come about?

MS: Well, London was very open at that stage with people from all over the world. The bands were the kings of the day. They were creative and original and they were mainly groups without an obvious leader. I met Eric Clapton and he just asked me to do the record covers for Cream. I think the covers somehow captured the sound of their music.

CF: As well as the record cover Wheels of Fire winning the New York Art Directors Prize for the Best Album Design in 1969, you also created some of the most acclaimed images of the era, such as Bob Dylan's 1967 album cover Mister Tambourine Man and the 'exploding' poster of Jimi Hendrix.

MS: Yes, well they were like tributes, printed by Peter Ledeboer's Big O Posters and sold for about a pound.

CF: You had one famous gallery exhibition in London where you combined two reproductions of well-known artworks into single images using collage.

MS: I had become interested in Magritte. I would take an image from one reproduced painting and combine it with another. It was rather like a parent and child: two different artists were the parents; the child had to look like both parents but it was in fact its own thing, its own self. All the works had mirror frames and were hung so they reflected into each other, enhancing the whole experience. They became the basis for my Art Book (1972), which later Tim Lewis and I used as sketches for paintings which I exhibited in Sydney.

CF: You came back to Sydney in 1969 for an exhibition which ended up being held in the old Clune Galleries in Potts Point. In 1971 your 'The Incredible Shrinking Exhibition', held in the same premises, gave birth to the Yellow House. What were the ideas behind this?

MS: The name was a tribute to Van Gogh. I wanted to carry on his idea of a place in the South of France where artists could work and live together. It had a lot to do with Van Gogh but it was under the umbrella of Magritte's figurative style which was very accessible to anyone; you didn't have to know about art to get a feeling for his work, that was one of his great achievements. I always call it democratic surrealism. It kept ideas moving. We had a highly organised visual environment and all sorts of other things could happen within it. It was like a garden for growing art and performance ...

CF: Your largest work has been the repainting and redesigning of the Luna Park facade. What attracted you to the commission?

MS: ... When we first arrived it was on the edge of ruination but it was the most densely packed area of images, sculpture and paintings in Sydney. We did a lot of work on the history of it, writing reports to try and save as much as we could. But after the fire it became a different thing altogether - the growing suspicion of a purposeful event and not the accident we might have been led to believe it was. It opened up into a citizen's investigation into the cause of the fire. So when Luna Park burned down everything changed. Now I see a whole level of symbolism which I think is the most important part of my work ...

This article appears in excerpted form. You can read the entire article in Art & Australia's Spring 2009 issue.