Richard Larter: Free Radical exhibition tour

Overview

Join exhibition curator and Drill Hall Gallery Director Tony Oates, for a lunchtime tour of Richard Larter: Free Radical and Riffing On: Pat Larter’s Rhythms and Pete Maloney’s Blues.

Richard Larter has long been recognised as a founding father of Australian pop art, a role he, with typical contrariness, rejected. His working ethos was as a non-conformist, entirely anti-authoritarian, scorning of power inequity. Arresting, bold and daring, Larter’s painting found energy in a fusion of popular culture, mechanical reproduction, the power of the ‘image’, new science, page 3 smut, and global politics.

This exhibition locates Larter’s rich stream of luminous abstract paintings (many painted in Canberra) within the body of his figurative work. While informed by his adventures into popular culture these works are also firmly rooted in the histories of abstraction, holding great concern for composition and the formal dynamic relationships of colour, shape and line. Fluid, lyrical and improvised, Larter’s work refers to the energies of place and the politics of the times.