Richard Larter

There’s no painter quite like Richard Larter (1929-2014). After emigrating from Britain with his wife Pat and young family in 1962 and settling in Luddenham on the semi-rural outskirts of Sydney, Larter had his first exhibition at Watters Gallery in 1965. Over the next decade, he became a renegade in the Australian art scene (represented in Melbourne by Niagara Galleries) with his genre-busting combinations of abstraction and figuration, his political and pornographic subject matter, his playful yet direct challenges to censorship, prudishness, and narrow-mindedness of any kind. When fellow artist Mike Brown was prosecuted for obscenity in 1966 following an exhibition at Gallery A, Larter held a Non-Exhibition at Watters with nothing on the walls. And just when he’d garnered an impressive reputation for his figurative, erotic, pop art pictures, many featuring his wife, co-conspirator, and collaborator Pat Larter, he gave that away (for a time, he did in fact return to figuration) stating—perhaps disingenuously—in 1983: “I have always preferred to work quietly in an unfashionable area, where I am unlikely to be influenced by transient trends. Using rollers and trimmers to make marks, I am finding vast unexplored tracts of painting opening before me, and I look forward to the next decade with keen anticipation.”

Larter was not usually described—or thought of—as working “quietly.” Largely self-taught, something of a polymath, his hugely inquisitive mind and seemingly boundless energy led him from explorations in colour theory to the radical edge of contemporary art. As Deborah Hart points out in Richard Larter, the definitive book on the artist, published to coincide with the National Gallery of Australia’s popular and critically acclaimed A Retrospective in 2008, his work was acquired early by public galleries and institutions as well as by private collectors. In Australian Painting: 1788 – 1970 Bernard Smith called him “probably the most original talent to emerge in Australia in recent years within the context of Pop and erotic art.”

Throughout his career, Larter had an enduring fascination for the material qualities of paint and experimented with unusual ways of mark-making that could expand the possibilities of the picture field. In the 1960s, he filled hypodermic needles with paint to make very fine fluid lines. He had to give up this method due to pharmacies becoming suspicious (in the anti-drugs paranoia of the time) and refusing to supply him with syringes. He then discovered small rollers that could be loaded with colour to make a kind of modern impressionism or pointillism, an effect that also referenced pixels in television images and blown-up photographs on billboards or in magazines. A neat acrylic pad used by house painters as an edging tool had a texture like velvet—with it, Larter would make dreamy psychedelic rainbows.

Fast forward to 2024 when not one, but two exhibitions are shining a light on the creative, painterly aspect of Larter’s practice. In November, Utopia Art Sydney is putting on Richard Larter: Radical, a selection of landscapes. On November 7 in Canberra, ANU’s Drill Hall Gallery opens Richard Larter: Free Radical, a broader selection of works leaning into abstraction. The exhibitions are designed to converse with one another; offering insights and explorations into Larter as colourist, Larter as landscape artist, Larter as abstract painter.

“I like the notion of volatility in general,” says curator Tony Oates, director of ANU’s Drill Hall Gallery. In the catalogue essay for Free Radical, he draws attention to the scientific definition of the term (an independent particle containing an unpaired electron resulting in an element that is highly reactive and volatile), not just the political sense. Overall, he’s casting a new lens on Larter, considering (or perhaps reconsidering) the artist’s prolific and diverse practice in terms of flux and oscillation, and the energy created by that. Arguably, a great deal of the dynamism in such figurative works as Dithyrambic Painting, 1965, and The Identity That Was Almost, 1972, for example, is created by the tension between the bright painterly patterns and the provocative, confronting images. The eye constantly moves between modes of expression. Abstract works such as Epicyclodial sliding shift, 1983, or Composition No. 2, 1988, (where fractured circles of pulsating colours whir like machine cogs or shift like kaleidoscopes) reveal the influence of Sonia and Robert Delaunay and the art movement of simultanism.

If Larter was fascinated by the Delaunays, particularly the genius of Sonia, and the colour theories of Eugène Chevreul and Johannes Itten, he was equally influenced by Pierre Bonnard and Claude Monet (on Larter’s first trip to Paris in 1949, he apparently visited Musée de L’Orangerie daily for over a week) and the luminosity of his style grows out of impressionism. Larter’s shimmering landscapes such as Wisteria and Tamarisk, 1994, and Prunus, 1994, in Radical at Utopia Art Sydney are simply gorgeous, yet hold more complex ways of seeing. Windows frame scenes. There is sometimes a filmic sense of being in a moving vehicle (a train, a car, a bus—born out of actual trips between Sydney and Yass, or around Canberra) with strips of fence flashing by or trees flickering. In others, decorative mosaic-like elements fragment and embellish the view. In the early syringe painting Party at the Opera House Site, 1965, a Mark Tobey-influenced cityscape teeters on the edge of abstraction.

Richard and Pat Larter and their five children moved from Sydney to Yass in 1982 where they had a garden of European flowers. The landscape literally changed. After Pat died in 1996 Richard moved to Canberra, and the landscape changed again. The Larters were influential on a generation of upcoming Canberra artists and Pat was a provocative artist in her own right. Just as Richard and Pat were inseparable from one another (even after death Richard continued to paint her from memory), so landscape and abstract elements are indivisible from the figurative in Larter’s oeuvre. In an obituary for the ABC in 2014 Deborah Hart wrote: “He was like this tremendous blast of fresh air on the Australian art scene.” As these new exhibitions prove, Larter’s work is astoundingly fresh today.

This essay was originally published in Artist Profile, issue 69 

EXHIBITION
Richard Larter: Free Radical & Riffing on: Pat Larter’s Rhythms and Peter Maloney’s Blues
8 November 2024 – 19 January 2025
Drill Hall Gallery, ANU Canberra