Pat Larter:
There’s Something About Pat
A new exhibition highlights the extraordinary art
career of Pat Larter, whose bold and transgressive
oeuvre continues to resonate.
Image credit: Pat Larter, Pat’s anger, 1992. National Art Archive | Art Gallery of New South Wales, gift of Richard Larter 1999 © Estate of Pat Larter © Richard Larter
If you have spent time in the collection galleries of a public art museum in Australia – somewhere among the pop imagery of the 1960s and the psychedelic abstraction of the 1970s – there’s a good chance you would have come across a portrait of Pat Larter.
Pat is considered to be one of the most depicted muses in the history of Australian art.1 For over three decades she was painted by her husband, artist Richard Larter, with a prolific and insatiable zeal.
But Pat was not only a muse. She was also an artist in her own right. Wonderfully provocative, collaborative and humorous, Pat challenged conventions of female representation. Moving across performance art, film, mail art and eventually to painting, she played with and pushed at stereotypes of desire, sex and sexuality. Pat was an artist who put forward progressive ideas about gender, the body and class, who stretched the boundaries of accepted modes of making, who made the art she wanted to and put it out in the world in the way she wanted to, and who was celebrated by many other artists – including her husband.
Which begs the question: why is it that, to date, Pat Larter is largely known only within the context of her husband’s artworks?
The hierarchies of gender and artform that have shaped institutions and their collections, as well as art history, begin to provide an answer. With this in mind, it is worth noting that the upcoming solo exhibition of Pat Larter at the Art Gallery of New South Wales (AGNSW ), Pat Larter: get arted – the first solo presentation of her work by a public institution – is drawn primarily from the gallery’s National Art Archive, which has become a repository for art practices that do not fit neatly within the structures of the traditional museum model...Subscribe to read this article in full
