Peter Booth

Beauty and violence coalesce in Peter Booth’s surrealist paintings. A key figure in 20th-century Australian art, Booth works in both abstraction and figuration. He attended Sheffield Institute of Arts in the U.K. before immigrating with his family to Australia in 1958, attending the National Gallery of Victoria Art School. In the early 1970s, Booth initially explored hard-edge abstraction, but by 1977 he also began to introduce figurative and abstract landscape imagery inspired by Romanticism into his work. He is best known for unsettling scenes inspired by the prehistoric Australian outback. These paintings are populated with grotesque mutant creatures set against a brooding, abstract atmosphere. Even in more traditional portraits, there is a disturbing quality to Booth’s work. In Old Man in Snow (2003), sold for $113,865 at auction in 2010, the subject’s lined, pale yellow face seems leary against the unrelenting snow. Booth represented Australia at the 1982 Venice Biennale, and a major retrospective was held at the National Gallery of Victoria in 2003.