TarraWarra announces Melbourne’s first major Peter Booth exhibition in nearly 20 years

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.

His 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.

TarraWarra Museum

• The first major exhibition of Booth’s work since 2003
• It will be held at TarraWarra Museum of Art in Healesville
• It will run from 26 November 2022 – 13 March 2023

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Booth was born in November 1940 in Sheffield, England, where his father worked in one of the local steel mills. Just a few weeks later, the town became the target of a heavy German bombing campaign that inflicted widespread devastation and hundreds of casualties.

While initially his paintings of fiery, turbulent environments were the stage for deeply unsettling narratives, during the late 1980s and 1990s, Booth’s landscapes became increasingly depopulated. Largely characterised by brooding scenes shrouded in drifts of snow but also occasionally verdant, animated landscapes of lush vegetation, over the past three decades, these paintings have continued to explore a range of personal, political and environmental themes.

Since this time, the artist’s regular solo exhibitions have continued to receive sustained critical attention and have consolidated his reputation as one of Australia’s most inventive figurative artists.

In 2003–2004, Booth’s singular practice was the subject of a major retrospective exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria, curated by Jason Smith. The integral place of Booth’s works within the history of late 20th-century and early 21st-century art has also been recognised by his inclusion in major public national and international collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Guggenheim.

 

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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,” Fitzpatrick said.

“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.”

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.

For more information, head here.