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.

Life-long partners Richard and Pat Larter spent a large portion of their lives living in Yass, NSW and after Pat’s death in 1996, Richard moved to Canberra and became well-embedded within its cultural scene. Their influence was wide reaching and formative for several generations of Canberra artists.

Riffing On brings together a selection of works borne out of the 1993 exhibition Pat Larter’s Rhythms & Pete Maloney’s Blues in which Maloney’s paintings perform as backdrops, stages and sets for Larter’s models and subjects. Performative practice was essential to Pat Larter’s oeuvre, providing the context and subject matter to her painting. Explicit, energised and charged, these paintings and photo-collages are supported by archival material documenting performance and place.

Richard Larter: Free Radical and Riffing On: Pat Larter’s Rhythms and Pete Maloney’s Blues runs 8 November, 2024 – 19 January, 2025

Curated by Tony Oates

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Image: Richard Larter, The Identity That Was Almost (detail), 1972, synthetic polymer paint on canvas, 175 × 240 cm. Estate of the Artist © Estate of Richard Larter