Sunday Arts Magazine

19 Dec 2022

Peter Booth

Art Exhibition, Arts, Arts Festival, Sunday Arts Magazine, Visual Arts

A survey exhibition of the work of major Australian artist Peter Booth will be held at
TarraWarra Museum of Art, 26 November 2022 – 13 March 2023.
With a remarkable career spanning several decades, Melbourne-based Booth is a unique voice in
Australian painting and is considered by many to be one of the most significant contemporary artists
working in Australia today.
This new survey of paintings and works on paper will be the first major public gallery exhibition of
Peter Booth’s work since the NGV retrospective in 2003 and will feature a number of the artist’s

most significant works from the 1970s to 1990s, alongside important recent works from the past two
decades.
Curated by TarraWarra’s Anthony Fitzpatrick, the exhibition will be presented thematically, honing in
on and highlighting particular motifs, subjects and moods which have become hallmarks of Booth’s
expansive oeuvre: stillness and turbulence; alterity and alienation; mutation and hybridity; the
absurd and the grotesque; the road and the ruin; and the despoilation and the resilience of nature.
“This exhibition will reveal Booth’s extraordinary capacity to transmute his intensely personal
perceptions of the mysteries and forces of nature, and the folly and hubris of human endeavours,
into exceptional and deeply-compelling paintings and drawings,” Mr Fitzpatrick said.
A small group of abstract paintings from the mid-1970s at the start of the exhibition provide a
prelude to an important series of gestural paintings which mark the beginning of the artist’s journey
into a neo-expressionist figurative style.
The exhibition progresses through Booth’s vivid imaginings of an apocalyptic world characterised by
grotesque, unsettling, and at times absurd scenes of human and hybrid figures in varying states of
apprehension, aggression and conflict.
These works will be accompanied by a small selection of prints by William Blake, James Ensor,
Francisco Goya, and Samuel Palmer, visionary artists who have been important touchstones for
Booth and with whom he shares a number of affinities.
This survey will also bring together important works from the past three decades to convey
humanity’s often fraught and ambiguous relationship to the natural world.
“Initially Booth’s highly visceral paintings of fiery, turbulent environments were the stage for
confronting and, at times, violent human encounters. Since the 1990s, many of the scenes he has
painted have become increasingly depopulated, implicating the viewer who is called to contemplate
and navigate their own subjective relationship to these vivid landscapes.
“Most recently, the artist has returned to the apocalyptic imagery that characterised his first forays
into figuration, with large-scale paintings of desolate and devastated scenes of a world in a
cataclysmic state of collapse. This is art for a time of ecological and existential crisis in which
anthropogenic impacts have driven the planet, and its intricate web of ecosystems, to the brink of
utter catastrophe,” Mr Fitzpatrick said.
The exhibition will be generously supported by The Balnaves Foundation.
Hamish Balnaves, Chief Executive Officer and Trustee of The Balnaves Foundation, said, “The
Balnaves Foundation is pleased to continue its support for TarraWarra Museum of Art to deliver new
major exhibitions by Australian artists.
The Foundation is a proud partner in these important endeavours, providing vital opportunities for
Australian artists to be showcased, whilst providing outstanding arts experiences to a broad range of
audiences

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