RICHARD LARTER

Australian and European Paintings, Christie's, Melbourne, 23 November 1998, lot 95
Private collection, Melbourne
Fine Australian and European Paintings, Sotheby's, Sydney, 16 August 1999, lot 101
Private collection, Melbourne

Bodies and Minds, Charles Nodrum Gallery, Melbourne, 15 May - 2 June 2007

Work is good, original condition. Surface variously distressed and abraided; UV examination reveals retouchings (possibly by artist) lower left, lower centre, centre right and upper right.
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Richard Larter was born in Great Britain in 1929 and migrated to Australia in 1962. He has exhibited widely over a forty-year career, and is currently the subject of a major retrospective at the National Gallery of Australia; previous art museum survey shows have included Stripperama (Heide Museum of Modern Art,Melbourne, 2002) and Richard Larter: A Survey 1985 (University Art Museum, University of Queensland). He is represented in all major national,state and university and regional collections.

Larter's paintings of the 1960s and early 1970s are to a significant degree the product of his English origins – their horror vacui all-overness a strange hybrid of the crowded, 'kitchen sink' domestic realism of John Bratby and the collage-pop of the 1961 London 'Young Contemporaries': Peter Blake, R.B. Kitaj, David Hockney, Allen Jones et al. Larter is very much concerned with abstract pictorial values, and while his imagery of pornography and politics (particularly the playful erotic performances of his wife Pat) can be confronting, his primary interests are those of a painter, with the images serving as vehicles for or interruptions to essentially abstract fields: loopy embroideries of syringe-extruded paint or screens of spots and blots. In the present work raunchy images of Pat Larter sit flat on the frontal plane. Behind them shimmers a delicate pattern of coloured dots, the complimentary and contrasting yellows, greens and blues giving the red a singing intensity.