Aleksander Danko was born in Adelaide, the son of Ukrainian refugee parents who had arrived in Australia, via Germany, in 1948. Their circumstances led him to feel a sense of displacement in suburban Adelaide. He found the South Australian School of Art in Adelaide an ideal place to investigate the logical consequences of such feelings. His first exhibition in Adelaide in 1970 was with the concrete poet Richard Tipping. He subsequently came to the attention of Frank Watters and Geoffrey Legge of Sydney’s Watters Gallery, and also met like-minded artists and curators.
His 1973 exhibition Ideas, Words, Processes whimsically investigated the nature of the made object, with visual and written puns. Later he began to make works reflecting on the atrophied nature of his immigrant parents’ relationship with the culture of their childhood, and the insular nature of Australian suburban culture.
