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Anna Schwartz Gallery presents The Human Condition, an exhibition of new paintings by Peter Booth. Peter Booth is an epic storyteller. His art records an odyssey powered by imagination and disciplined by four decades of painting and drawing. The imagery of his work, distanced from the immediate and the particular, gains ascent to wider universal reading by virtue of its power in addressing both the cultural chimeras of our mythic past and prophecies of the imagined future. Nurtured by literature and drawn from dreams and memory which have survived the delovution of time, Booth’s dramatic and poetic images of the human spirit are framed within a world both observed and imagined. Their portrayal of different psychological states of mind documents a cultural journey that traverses anxiety, violence, spiritual turmoil, alienation and acceptance. Excerpt from ‘Hard Rain: The Iconography of Peter Booth’, Robert Lindsay, in Peter Booth: HUMAN/NATURE, National Gallery of Victoria, 2003-04 Peter Booth was born in Sheffield, England and moved to Australia in the late 1950s. He has been an important figure in Australian art since the 1960s and was included in the National Gallery of Victoria’s definitive 1968 exhibition The Field. From the mid-1970s, Booth’s oeuvre has been characterised by dream-like, often apocalyptic imagery, including ambivalent and metaphoric landscapes and astute, unflinching interpretations of human nature. In 2003-04, The National Gallery of Victoria presented a major retrospective of Booth’s work curated by Jason Smith. More recently, Booth exhibited 21st Century, 2008 and Memories, 2010 at Anna Schwartz Gallery. His paintings, sculptures and works on paper are held in many significant public and private collections in Australia and abroad. |