I checked out the current Peter Booth exhibition at Rex Irwin Gallery last weekend, and it did not disappoint. Here’s Man in cardboard, which I’d been surveying (on the invitation that’s currently gracing our fridge) for a few weeks before visiting the show.
Often a work looked at first in reproduction doesn’t stand up when finally seen in the “flesh”, but this one certainly does for me.
Peter Booth
Painting 2008 (Man in Cardboard)
oil on canvas, 101 x 91cm
(Evidently there’s a homeless gentleman in Melbourne who gets around in cardboard, and the painting references this brave man.)
Here’s another work from the show which for me is a stand-out:
Peter Booth
Painting 2008 (Crouching Man)
oil on canvas, 51 x 71cm
Booth’s work touches on the existential condition of men (read both ways, as in “humanity” and in “men-the-gender”). We are confronted by figures stripped back to the essential. They are revealed to us in such a robust way that the very act of depiction counters the knowledge of the pointlessness of their (and our own) existence. Revealed in this way, their situation is elevated; reminding us of the inevitably, the majesty of our own existence, and in that we are not alone.
Tagged as:
Art,
Peter Booth
I checked out the Heads show at Rex Irwin Art Dealer on Saturday, before it closed. As usual, there’s an air of subtly and assurance about the gallery – these people know how to put together a show where works from different worlds form a strong cohesion.
Take, for example, the juxtaposition of the African Hippopotamus (“large tusks with all teeth intact”)…
An African Hippopotamus, c. 1950
50cm X 41cm x 69cm
…the Over Modeled Head (“coconut fibre, clay, tree sap and spider web over human skull”)…
Over Modeled Head (detail)
Malekula, Vanuatu 20th C, 90cm x 16cm x 16cm
…and Peter Booth’s Head…
Peter Booth
Untitled 2008 (Head)
Oil on canvas, 36 x 51cm
Booth’s work connects so well with the other two – it’s got a primitive, animal, skull-bone feel to it, with a thickset neck that could also be a sturdy pillar directly to the earth; the void of the missing tooth counterpointing the intact set of the Hippopotamus (itself a highly complex assemblage of bone and teeth, the latter arrayed like foundation stones).
I’m left with a sense of how Booth taps into these primitive places of bone, skull, teeth – an early view, an existential view, of man, not so far from the neolithic.
Tagged as:
Art,
Peter Booth
We recently purchased this great work by Euan Macleod.
Euan Macleod
Bird figure 2007
Acrylic on paper, 76 x 56cm (image Rex Irwin Art Dealer)
The work was in the exhibition Figure in a Landscape at Rex Irwin gallery.
Here’s another great work from the same show:
Peter Booth
Drawing 2007
(Man and trees in snow)
Mixed media on paper, 13 x 27.5 cm (image Rex Irwin Art Dealer)
Tagged as:
Art,
Euan Macleod,
Peter Booth
