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"With the dots...I just can't help myself actually"

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Del Kathryn Barton - the feminine, the unashamedly decorative and the commercial. By Demi Poulos Del Kathryn Barton has become a well-known name among the Australian public and the art community. Her profound style has bewitched her fans, and her portrayal of sensitive subject matter such as the body, children in art, and her flourished,...

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I first viewed Del Kathryn Barton's work "Come of Things" at the Melbourne Art Fair in 2010. Quite frankly, I was in awe of this work. I didn't know where to begin, in fact, I could just start looking anywhere into that landscape and be lost in the intricacy of those delicate marks. I remember making several journeys, around and around and kept being drawn back to the powerful imagery, almost shimmering with life and other worldliness. Residing in Sydney, Barton is a leading contemporary artist who offers her audiences a powerful cacophony of imagery, naturally inviting lively debate and discussion. She shares with her viewers her vulnerability, innocence and connectedness to the natural landscape and the unseen world. Her attention to detail and her close relationship and in depth understanding of her mark making proves that she is dedicated and methodical in her process.

its not a little love song, 2011
acrylic, gouache, watercolour and ink on polyester canvas
182 × 163cm
Courtesy of the artist and Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney.
A mountain climber and instructor for years, this sure-footed, step-by-step approach clearly applies to her drawings, paintings and sculptural works. I had the opportunity to hear Del talk in depth about her drawings at Heide Gallery in early 2011, where she explained that it could sometimes take her up to 6 months to do a detailed drawing. These drawings are often done in a meditative, repetitive and methodical way, slowly, and over a long period of time. She indicates during this discussion that she had to exhibit her work otherwise, having drawings 'lying around' made her feel 'anxious'.

Barton also reveals to her audience that her mark is 'honest and vulnerable'. Architectural pens are applied directly on the paper so 'there is no going back'. She says that she takes risks and is not good at pre-drawing, and as a result, there are a lot of rejects in her studio. And in regards to her mark making and the meaning attached, she explains: "My drawings are made of highly personalised symbology...there is an energetic visual quality in the repetitive pattern". Standing in front of a large-scale work or even a smaller scale drawing, there is the visual quality of Barton's repetitious pattern that optically, can be challenging in its own way. But there is also the spiritual or personal journey associated with the symbology within those intricate marks.

Del Kathryn Barton
for the feeling, 2011
acrylic, gouache, watercolour and ink on polyester canvas
240 × 360cm
Courtesy of the artist and Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney.
Barton's illustrative graphic style works, particularly her paintings, explore a myriad of colours, line styles and patterns; adornments are also abounding. She uses a large variety of materials, often mixing synthetic polymer paint, gouache, watercolour, pen, glitter and sequins. Her paintings show an obsession with meticulous mark making; from miniscule dotting, to veins on leaves and strands of hair. Being that the production process for her larger paintings is extremely labour intensive, she now employs an assistant as demand for her work has substantially increased. In many of her paintings, it is evident that there is a clear aversion to white space, and to overcome this, she often creates an environment where each subject or creature is intertwined somehow together and in with their surroundings. Often this intertwining is used to convey the attachment of parent and child, either human or non-human in form. An array of curly and intertwining, vein like tendrils connect mother to offspring. Women and girls gaze into the landscape, sometimes half- human or alien like with multiple breasts and open hands. Birds, snakes and lady beetles are often scrambling through this intermeshing world, nurturing and being nurtured; all part of the 'giving and receiving' that Barton frequently refers to in her interviews. Artists such as Louise Bourgeouis and John Currin, who have both drawn on themes of sexuality and isolation in their work, are strong influences. Botanical art and fabric design are also utilised for inspiring her highly patterned works (Art and Australia).

Del Kathryn Barton
from her nest in the holm-oak tree the nightingale heard him, 2011
acrylic, gouache, watercolour and ink on polyester canvas
173 × 153cm
Courtesy of the artist and Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney.
Other features of her works are images of women, girls and boys with exaggerated features such as large, almost manga style eyes, elongated fingers and limbs. As for those big, liquid shiny eyes, Del explains in an interview with Rosalie Higson, it was about her love affair with her first child, Kell: "I came to motherhood with no experience of children or babies and it just blew me away how clear their eyes are ...his eyes were wide open and I think that was one of the most significant experiences of my whole life"(The Australian, 2008). A fine example of these eyes of her children is evident in her 2008-winning portrait for the Archibald Prize.

Del Kathryn Barton
satellite fade-out, 2011
acrylic, gouache, watercolour and ink on polyester canvas
163 × 143cm
Courtesy of the artist and Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney.
Barton's landscapes are reflective of her varied experiences, influences and affinity with nature and 'the unseen'. Through her highly detailed works, she has been able to deal with strong emotions that have prevailed since childhood; and has openly worked through these feelings with her audience. She has achieved this by pursuing her feelings surrounding sexuality and the human figure, and its relationship with the natural world.

Del Kathryn Barton is represented by:

Karen Woodbury Galley in Melbourne and Rosyln Oxley9 Gallery in Sydney

References:

Higson Rosalie, The Face: Del Kathryn Barton Story, The Australian, May 3, 2008

Claire Armstrong: http://www.artaustralia.com/article.asp?issue_id=7&article_id=51

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By Celeste Hawkins I first viewed Del Kathryn Barton's work "Come of Things" at the Melbourne Art Fair in 2010. Quite frankly, I was in awe of this work. I didn't know where to begin, in fact, I could just start looking anywhere into that landscape and be lost in the intricacy of those delicate marks.

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The artist says her home town is the perfect fit for her.

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Del Kathryn Barton Biography - Del Kathryn Barton on artnet

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Read the biography of Del Kathryn Barton. Discover interesting facts about Del Kathryn Barton on artnet.

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Free entry

NGV Australia, Federation Square

Level 3, 20th-21st C Australian Art

17 Nov 17 - 12 Mar 18

The NGV presents a major solo exhibition of one of Australia's most popular artists, Del Kathryn Barton. Del Kathryn Barton: The Highway is a Disco reveals the artist's imaginative and deeply sensuous world, where ornately decorated species - both human and animal - are rendered in seductive line and colour. Del Kathryn Barton: The Highway is a Disco is a survey of new and recent work by the two times Archibald Portrait Prize winner that reveals the breadth of Barton's practice. Featuring comprehensive displays of recent paintings and drawings for which she is arguably best known, the exhibition also includes collage, sculpture, textiles and film, all drawn together by the artist's exuberant and psychedelic aesthetic.

Born in Sydney in 1972, Barton graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the College of Fine Arts, University of New South Wales, Sydney, in 1993. In 2015, Barton was awarded an Australian Film, Television and Radio School Creative Fellowship, following her directorial debut of The Nightingale and the Rose (2015). Her work is held in major public collections including: the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney; the Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane; the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra; the Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide and the Museum of Old and New Art, Hobart.

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Level 3, 20th-21st C Australian Art The NGV presents a major solo exhibition of one of Australia's most popular artists, Del Kathryn Barton. Del Kathryn Barton: The Highway is a Disco reveals the artist's imaginative and deeply sensuous world, where ornately decorated species - both human and animal - are rendered in seductive line and colour.

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"We have to fight to preserve our child selves," says Del Kathryn Barton.

It's the day before the opening of her new exhibition, The Highway is a Disco, at NGV Australia. There is still clanking, thumping and hammering going on inside the multi-roomed space that will house more than 150 of the two-time Archibald prize-winner's works for the summer. This will be the biggest exhibition of Barton's work to date, from the paintings that made her famous, to sketches, sculpture and film.

The artist herself, however, seems calm. She is seated to one side of a 10m-long, five-panel series of paintings, each containing an image of a dragon and a girl entwined together, swirling patterns of dots and waves engulfing them. This is sing blood-wings sing, a new work that will make its public debut at the Melbourne gallery this week. Like many of Barton's paintings, its human and animal figures are almost inextricable. A whole spectrum of colour bursts from the frame, but the pinks, blues and purples are what the mind remembers.

The art of Del Kathryn Barton is a door to a jungly, fertile universe. Her paintings contain the shapes and textures of the natural world - beehives, water, spiderwebs, smooth-skinned trees, bubbles, worms, the night sky - and yet they are otherworldly. This otherworld is populated by unsmiling, anatomically bizarre characters: one has four breasts; another has sixteen eyes; another has no body at all. With their pointed noses and chins, elongated necks and limbs, these characters all have an elfin quality - even when they are direct representations of living people, such as the portrait of herself and her two children that won the Archibald in 2008, or the portrait of actor Hugo Weaving that won in 2013.

Sing blood-wings sing is Barton's take on the story of Puff the Magic Dragon, from 1963 the folk song by Peter, Paul and Mary. ("This might be a bit sacrilegious actually," she says, before admitting she actually prefers Will Oldham's cover.) She's given Puff her own characteristic spin though, replacing the male protagonists with female protagonists, and altering the "beats" - a term she uses often to talk about key thematic or narrative elements in her work - to have distinctly female elements.

"It is a coming of age work, and living with my daughter who's 12 now, and at that very tender, fierce, vulnerable, complex age, with her changing consciousness around her body and the way that she exists in the world, I feel like there's a lot of her in this work," she tells Guardian Australia.

"When we think of dragons in a classical fairy story context, we think of them as slaying - forces of murder and destruction. I've tried to collapse that, so the blood beat speaks to menstruation as a kind of vital, proud, strong experience for a young woman."

Barton is open and expressive with a warm and generous laugh, yet it has been a hard year: her mother's recent death from cancer was preceded by a long period of palliative care, and Barton's desire to be as present as possible for that meant a huge disruption to her usual creative routines, on top of the already challenging role of being a working mother.

One of the artistic consequences of that period of upheaval is the second new work on display in this exhibition: an enormous sculptural piece, at the foot of your love, which dominates an entire room. The work is comprised of a giant conch shell carved from Huon pine, which sits before a silk sail printed with a patchwork of images: flowers, breasts, sky. Ropes that transform into arms and hands stretch before the conch as if in yearning. Here, like in many of Barton's paintings and drawings, representations of the human body are entwined with objects and natural elements in ways that are both beautiful and jarring.

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at the foot of your love (2017) by Del Kathryn Barton Photograph: Tom Ross

Not all artists would be confident to break away from their core medium - for Barton, painting and drawing - so dramatically, but Barton says has a tendency to become bored and restless in her practice. Her exploration of alternative forms such as sculpture and film feels like "a different way of telling similar stories", and she enjoys the challenge of bringing "some very realised aesthetic sensibilities and skill to mediums that I know nothing about."

The work that closes off the exhibition is Red, a 15-minute filmic exploration of the "gloriously fucked up and poetic" sexual proclivities of the Australian redback spider. "I was thinking about the elemental, archetypal mother, who's not just a mother, she's seductress; she's murderess, she's epic mother," Barton explains. The film contains real spiders and human characters; to Barton, it's not simply a story about sexual cannibalism, but also a story about willingly sacrificing oneself for one's children.

She had originally envisaged Red to be a short, indie project: "Something that felt a little bit more like making a drawing." Then Cate Blanchett agreed to be attached to the work, taking it to whole new level.

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Cate Blanchett performs as the Mother in Red, Barton's short film about the mating rituals of the redback spider. Photograph: Adelaide festival

The highly accomplished 44-year-old artist that Barton is today seems, on one level, a far cry from the girl who grew up in the Australian countryside with little access or exposure to fine art, and who suffered from terrifying and disorienting "body-boundary confusions and sensory disorders". Yet that girl is immediately visible in the work itself.

"I've always had a very big energy in me that I have found hard to manage in some ways," Barton says. "I ground myself through obsessive mark-making. It's a state of very precarious balance ... it's about how to hold a bigness in a harmonious place."

The result is hectic and hyperactive imagery, full of rich detail and complex patterning, that is simultaneously incredibly controlled and extremely labour-intensive for the artist. "It pulls you in and pushes you back at the same time, I think," she says of her aesthetic. "It seduces you but it slaps you round."

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'The naked body is so many more things than [pornography]': Del Kathryn Barton's volcanic woman (2016) Photograph: Del Kathryn Barton

Seduction here is chiefly a metaphor: Barton is surprised and frustrated to find her work, with its prolific use of the naked female form, so often framed as explicit or hyper-sexual.

"I personally am not into the pornographic body," she says.

"The naked body is so many more things than that. It's the private body, it's the relaxed body in the bath, it's the breastfeeding body ... the birthing body, the pregnant body - they're states of being and states of body-being. And some of the most heightened pleasure zones that I personally have experienced as a woman."

Barton's work makes more sense when seen as a fusion of dreamscapes and deep emotional narratives - and she does often draw on her own dreams in her art. But to interpret the childlike interrogation, imagination and wonder with which those narratives are presented as naive or simplistic - or, conversely, to see them through a primarily voyeuristic lens - is to miss the point.

"I just want, ideally, people to bring much more open, porous kind of engagements to the work," Barton says.

She refers to the "wild element of self and collective unconscious", and it seems more than anything that her work is an exercise in turning the self - the body, the experience of physical existence - inside out: exposing that parallel life, the imaginative, emotional life that we so often repress or ignore, with all its contradictions and glories and ecstasies and fears. In that way, her characters are not so otherworldly after all, but simply representations of a forgotten way of being ourselves.
* Del Kathryn Barton: The Highway is a Disco is showing at NGV Australia, Melbourne, until 12 March 2018* Guardian Australia was a guest of the National Gallery of Victoria Topics

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Del Kathryn Barton's fertile universe: 'The naked body is so many things'

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"We have to fight to preserve our child selves," says Del Kathryn Barton. It's the day before the opening of her new exhibition, The Highway is a Disco, at NGV Australia. There is still clanking, thumping and hammering going on inside the multi-roomed space that will house more than 150 of the two-time Archibald prize-winner's works for the summer.

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Prize-winning artist Del Kathryn Barton's eccentric Australian bush upbringing deeply influences her shimmering, delicate work, writes Myffy Rigby .

If one could distill a person's entire life into two words, the two-time Archibald prize-winning artist Del Kathryn Barton's might be Tight Curation.

The Sydney-based fine artist, sculptor and filmmaker has had to learn to harness the white noise.

Creatively, she dances on the tip of a needle, ever on the precipice of the truly outrageous.

"The challenge for me," Barton says, "is to almost put my blinkers on because I find the world overly stimulating sometimes."

The goal is to find a sense of quiet and stillness at the heart of the wild, cosmic rainbow of fruit flavours she leaves in her wake.

What began as art therapy for the anxiety and depression Barton suffered as a child is now her vocation. Her eye for the strange, beautiful and delicate made her work immediately collectable, then propelled her into the wider public arena when she won the prestigious Archibald Prize in 2008 for her self- portrait You Are What Is Most Beautiful about Me.

Barton has since painted the likes of actors Cate Blanchett in 2011 and Hugo Weaving in 2013 - and won a second Archibald.

A multimedia juggernaut, Barton collaborates beyond art, joining forces with Anna Plunkett and Luke Sales, the duo behind fashion label Romance Was Born, to work on projects including a children's show that inspired Barton's 2013 artwork, What I Am Also.

Most recently, Barton won an Australian Academy of Cinema and Television Arts Award for her work on the reinterpreted Oscar Wilde fairytale, The Nightingale and the Rose - a stop-motion animation created with filmmaker Brendan Fletcher and scored by Australian songbird Sarah Blasko.

Art, Barton has been known to say, saved her life. The steps to success, however, were no cakewalk. Before moving to Sydney to start art school, she lived in tents and sheds with her family.

"I had this strange, almost hippie-style upbringing,'' Barton says. She swam, rode and drew. "I very much lived in the world of the imagination. And I do feel those years deeply informed my creative spirit and essence, which is still incredibly manifest in my work today. I draw a lot of energy from the natural landscape.''

Take that anxiety and depression, remove the sanctuary of bush and family, then add the city and art student Barton was suddenly navigating Sydney streets, sinking into human traffic, alone and lost in the noise.

I had this strange, almost hippie-style upbringing

"I think if I knew then what I know now, I would have found pursuing a career of being a fine artist insurmountable," she says. "I would have been crushed by that knowledge."

Initially, it was an experience that almost sucked her up and swallowed her whole. Instead, she learned to arm herself - pursuing her art with tenacity and surrounding herself with beauty. A little like a very sensitive magpie.

"I think the thing that sustained me most as a young artist was an incredible level of naivety and idealism and a bit of brokenness. The strong, emphatic advice I'd give to a young artist now is: 'Give everything to the work. And when you think you're giving everything, give more. It has to be your primary relationship'."

The magic and fantasy of Australiana-meets-other-worldliness in Barton's work is so dense and rich, one could almost sink in her landscapes of wild-and-outrageous dream-like flights of fancy; of space unicorns and cosmic bunnies, sex and crocuses, rebirth and reformation.

Barton"s world is filled with movement and light, deep colour and rich texture. Barton herself is a wild aesthete, found in furry sandals or polka dot silk pyjamas, or both. She is a sartorial renegade, a whirling dervish of colour and texture. Her home is so densely soaked in colour and movement, it almost vibrates.

The strong, emphatic advice I'd give to a young artist now is, give everything to the work.

"I do find my brain calms down when I'm in the presence of kinetic energy," Barton says. "And for me, there's something about surfaces so detailed that at a certain point they become minimal and the energy is so heightened that it becomes distilled."

On her walls and in her life, Barton takes inspiration from strong creative women, which in turn feeds deeply into her art. Works by indigenous artist Sally Gabori (1924-2015) take pride of place in her lounge room. "It's all about the integrity of the line and the energy in the work that you just believe. And there's a lot of prowess that's inexplicable."

She also points out a small drawing by influential Australian modernist Joy Hester (1920-1960). "I'm very mindful of the fact that she died very tragically of cancer around the age that I am now. The work that she made late in her life speaks so deeply to me. I think of that wonderful and curious paradox: the closer you are to death, the more life there is. For me, there's that alchemy in her work."

The idea that to stand still is to rot, and to be successful is to be consummate, rings true for Barton who, like many successfully creative people, is constantly producing work.

She harnesses a city's light, its energy, and admits to getting a little teary every time she flies back into town. As an extension of that, Barton reflects on Australia Day. "Existing within our richly multicultural society, it is with immense gratitude that I call myself Australian," she says.

The Highway is a Disco (2015)

"Of all the work I've made, this painting is very dear to my heart. The success of artworks, and your response to them, is an inexplicable and varied thing but there is just something very felt for me about this work.

"It crystallises more successfully and more passionately some of my other works.

"The strong female warrior protagonist riding her blue bunny through the universe on a singular little pink planet with two perfect waratahs ...It's incredibly idealised but equally strong and it's sort of my greatest vision for what I hoped my life might be."

We Will Ride (2014)

"The architecture of the waratah always reminds me of extraordinary little UFOs that have landed in the harsh, muted bush. Often Australian landscapes have deep tertiary colours - greys, browns - and the luminosity of that waratah is so insane.

"The kangaroo is almost like an artist sat down and made up a magicalcreature. There is just something so aesthetically unique about akangaroo.

"And it's also a painting that really unashamedly celebrates the mother. She has the little joey nestled in her pouch and hopefully it speaks about the strength and vulnerability that being a mother defines."

What I Am Also (2013)

"This was from a show that [fashion label] Romance Was Born had invited me to participate in. We have such an ongoing love affair and I know they're very careful in what they ask from me and I'm very careful what I ask from them, but basically it's always an emphatic 'Yes' before they even tell me the project. So I was very happy.

"And also being a mother, I felt to be more mindful of age-appropriate content, but I don't feel the picture lacks any verve or energy or electricity as a consequence of that mindfulness. I'm always a little bit sad-faced when there are no boobs in a painting."

Words Myffy Rigby | Editor Lynne Whiley | Design Kathleen Vrinat | Photos Nic Walker | Video Steven Siewert | Picture editor Mags King

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Prize-winning artist Del Kathryn Barton's eccentric Australian bush upbringing deeply influences her shimmering, delicate work, writes Myffy Rigby

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Powerful female sexuality is the essence of womanhood as imagined by Del Kathryn Barton in The Highway is a Disco exhibition at the NGV Australia. Perhaps best known for her intricate and colourful paintings of women with shape-shifting bodies and cool, detached faces, this exhibition sees Barton work across a multitude of media and explores many facets of female sexuality.

In addition to the paintings, dating back to 2005 but including recent works from 2017, there are works on paper, a series of collages, fabric works, sculpture, and RED, a film starring Cate Blanchett and the artist's own daughter.

The paintings are visually stunning, painstakingly executed and invite exploration. Spanning over ten metres, sing blood-wings sing is Barton's newest one and was apparently executed while listening to Peter, Paul and Mary's Puff the Magic Dragon. Over five panels, five of Barton's translucent, tight-lipped females sit astride/merge with/copulate with doe-eyed dragons in a pulsating, whirring night sky.

Barton has sometimes been accused of substituting surface for substance in her paintings. The eye is driven in a relentless frenzy around each of the panels, unable to rest anywhere and the viewer is constantly challenged to create meaning from the teeming symbols and motifs. The cool, almost haughty demeanour and elongated gesturing fingers of the women are at odds with their bodily ecstasy. The women of Barton's paintings live in their own imagined universes of the mind, realms within which they are fully in control.

In contrast to the tightly controlled paintings, the volcanic women series of drawings (2016), elicited in lush, loose, red lines, shows distorted and headless female forms at the moment of toe-curling orgasm, erupting powerfully with the earth's life forces. This is woman at the moment of transcendence of the rational, merging with the raw convulsing earth.

The collages in the 2017 series inside another land frequently feature the posed female body morphed with orchid flowers inviting the possibility of penetration and fertilisation. The fetishisation of breasts and eyes carries over from the painted works as the bodies, often in suggestive or explicit poses, are de-personalised and exhibited as hybrid specimens.

The small Louise Bourgeois-inspired sculptures of the penis room are complemented by the large sculpture at the foot of your love, created in response to the terminal illness of Barton's mother.

A large Huon pine vulval conch shell, appearing deceptively soft and malleable, emits a truncated umbilical rope. This lifeline cannot be reached by the pair of impossibly outstretched hands on the ground. A silk handkerchief, printed with Barton's collaged images, forms a backdrop, perhaps representing the traditional feminine as well as the tears of grief to be cried over the loss of a mother.

Barton, while rejecting claims to poetic mastery herself, is enamoured of words and their shifting meanings and slippery evocations. In her studio practice, she scribbles words on the walls for inspiration, and handwrites her titles into her works.

Possibly one of the least successful parts of this exhibition is the mud monster series of 2014 in which blood-red words drip and dribble on paper, emerging from a sea of black-and-white bubbles. Hung on a wall of photographic eyes, there is nothing very moving or profound here and, along with the expletives, it has all been done before and could possibly remain a part of the working process.

The 15-minute movie RED, screened in a darkened room with soft red pods for seating, is billed as a highlight of the exhibition and is Barton's first foray as a film director. While full of striking images that make for great stills and with strong performances by the cast, it works less well as a film and lacks subtlety, clarity and nuance.

This curious choice of subject matter highlights cultural ambiguities over female sexuality. The empowered female protagonist, juxtaposed with a female redback spider, shreds her power suit with scissored hands to reveal that she is encased in a blood-red net. She both struggles to release herself from it, and writhes in sensuous agony as she entrances and ensnares her male victim.

The female entices and bewitches a somewhat passive male, controlling the encounter and leaving him dead at its conclusion, as occurs when redback spiders copulate. We are shown that she has taken his seed through somewhat hackneyed images of swimming tadpoles, and a daughter is born.

Two possible take-home messages are that men are only needed for their seed; and that sexually powerful women are predatory, violent and ultimately deadly. In fact, rather than heralding a brave new world of female empowerment, this plays on the anxieties that lead directly back to castration complex, the witch trials, and the suppression of the feminine principle in the world.

Barton is angry, at the very least. Red is the colour of fury, of blood, of sacrifice, of life and of death. In the catalogue interview with Peggy Frew, Barton states:

RED is my first consciously feminist work, and I have found myself acutely attuned to the revitalised wave of female solidarity flooding the planet at this time. I am not an angry person; I am a lover. I really am. And I am an optimist. But recently I have found myself so fucking angry! Fuck resilience! I want leadership and even supremacy for my sisters! It is our time!

Although Barton feels that she is working from a feminist perspective, the vision she expresses comes across as personalised, idiosyncratic and inconsistent - not that there is anything wrong with that.

Paying tribute to major inspirations, the French-American artist Bourgeois and Japanese Yayoi Kusama, Del Kathryn Barton uses free association and a personal visual language influenced by Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele to express her subconscious desires and the rich fantasy life of her unbridled imagination.

Curiously, however, I find that it is the male gaze that is reproduced most often in this exhibition. Women are either de-personalised objects for display, reduced to breasts and genitalia, chilly and detached, or bucking headless cauldrons of destructive passion.
Del Kathryn Barton: The Highway is a Disco is at the NGV until March 18.

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Del Kathryn Barton explores powerful female sexuality but reproduces the male gaze

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Powerful female sexuality is the essence of womanhood as imagined by Del Kathryn Barton in The Highway is a Disco exhibition at the NGV Australia. Perhaps best known for her intricate and colourful paintings of women with shape-shifting bodies and cool, detached faces, this exhibition sees Barton work across a multitude of media and explores many facets of female sexuality.

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ARNDT konzentriert sich auf internationale zeitgenössische Kunst.

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Del Kathryn Barton - 136 Artworks, Bio & Shows on Artsy

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Find the latest shows, biography, and artworks for sale by Del Kathryn Barton