David Rankin was born in Plymouth, England. His family migrated to Australia in 1949 when Rankin was two.
The first exhibition of Rankin’s paintings was in Sydney, Australia, in 1968. He has subsequently had over 100 solo exhibitions. His work has been exhibited in many cities including New York, Berlin, Beijing, Paris, Zurich, Vienna, San Miguel de Allende (Mexico), and throughout Australia.
In 1989, Rankin and his wife, the poet and novelist Lily Brett, moved to New York.
Rankin’s paintings have been described as possessing a poetical and philosophical vision of the human spirit.
After Rankin’s first exhibition in New York, The New York Times art critic, Michael Brenson, wrote “David Rankin is a gifted painter with something to say....In the ‘Jerusalem Walls Tryptich’ (8 feet tall and almost 20 feet wide), the rust-colored rectangle in the center is at the same time a wall, a gateway and a block of light. The skull-like orbs in the panel on the left are like souls rising or falling.”
Of Rankin’s ‘Onement paintings’ Brenson wrote “They suggest books and Scripture. Mr. Rankin has linked the vertical ‘zips’ through the heart of the paintings with shafts of tantric light. They also hint at naked torsos and the way the history of the Holy Land remains very much a story of flesh. The entire show is something of a meditation on the saved and the damned and how difficult it can now be to distinguish between them.”
In 2000, the art critic and historian, Dore Ashton, the author of many books including “The New York School”, “Noguchi East and West”, and “About Rothko”, wrote “The Walls of the Heart: The Life and Work of David Rankin”. In 2013, Ashton updated the book and re-titled it “David Rankin the New York Years”.
In the 2021 Queen’s Birthday Honours, Rankin was awarded the Order of Australia Medal for services to the visual arts.