Artist Profile: Richard Larter by Susie Burge

By Susie Burge for Artist Profile Issue 69

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.”

Read the full profile here