HARD WET, 2017
DEL KATHRYN BARTON
synthetic polymer paint, gouache, watercolour and ink on linen
240.0 x 180.5 cm
signed, dated and inscribed left centre: – the / year / that / changed / my / life – /
– del / kathryn / barton – / 2017
inscribed with title right centre: – hard / wet –
inscribed with title lower left centre: – hard wet –
Albertz Benda, New York
Darren Tieste, Los Angeles, USA, acquired from the above in 2017
Mad Love, Arndt Art Agency (A3), Berlin, Germany, 6 June – 29 September 2017 (illus. in exhibition catalogue, p. 23)
Arndt, M,. and Wood, T. (eds.), Mad Love : Australian contemporary art, Arndt Art Agency, Berlin, 2017, pp. 8 (illus., installation photograph), 23 (illus.)
Cabiscol, L., 'Del Kathryn Barton - From Australia to Berlin', Metal Magazine, June 2017, (illus.), https://metalmagazine.eu/post/del-kathryn-barton-from-australia-to-berlin (accessed 16/10/24)
McDonald, J., 'Del Kathryn Barton shows off Australian art's risque side in Berlin', The Sydney Morning Herald, Sydney, 18 July 2017
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Del Kathryn Barton’s immersive and towering tableau Hard Wet, 2017 presents ethereal intertwined sisters, each tended to by a small, breasted nightingale. Slender, pale and brazenly denuded, this contorted and multilimbed being balances confidently atop a pink planet, from which grows a waratah in full bloom. Barton’s trademark blend of psycho-erotic suggestion and unashamed exuberant decoration endows Hard Wet with a dazzling seductive power. Painstakingly painted with a complex array of mark-making techniques in saturated colours, the work’s surface is entirely covered by a lavish cornucopia of minute details. A highly accomplished mature work, the serious and whimsical Hard Wet was painted during an annus mirabilis for the artist. In 2017, Barton held her first solo exhibition in New York, was honoured with a mid-career survey exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria, and also presented her curatorial début in Berlin – an exhibition including two of her own paintings, one being Hard Wet.
Funded and supported by a bilateral government agreement designed to strengthen cultural ties, Australia Now was a year-long programme celebrating Australian arts, culture, science and innovation throughout Germany. Within this framework, Australia’s collaboration with Arndt Art Agency demonstrated a historical dismantling of segregation between public and private spheres, united in the joint effort to create exposure for Australian art in continental Europe. Presented at the assiduous art dealer Matthias Arndt’s gallery in Berlin in June 2017, the group exhibition Mad Love was conceived and selected by Del Kathryn Barton, displaying contemporary Australian works with a radical approach to the human figure and human condition. Alongside two of her most recent paintings, Barton chose works by boundary-pushing artists Brook Andrew, Pat Brassington, Dale Frank, Ramesh Mario Nithiyendran, Patricia Piccinini, Ben Quilty and Paul Yore, and even included a few gestural abstract works by the late Kaiadilt artist from the Gulf of Carpentaria, Mirdidingkingathi Juwarnda Sally Gabori – an artist whom Barton greatly admires. A bold and visceral exhibition, Barton’s title Mad Love aptly referenced a famous 1937 collection of poems, Amour Fou, by the French father of Surrealism, André Breton. Breton’s essay, interspersed with autobiographical fragments, explored the conjunction between reality and the unconscious, a mystical vision marrying well with Barton’s paintings of fierce confidence and vulnerable metamorphosis some seventy years later.
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Barton’s horror vacui – the creative urge to cover the entire surface of her paintings with pulsating and scintillating patterns and small decorative motifs – is often said to be inspired by the works of Vienna Secession artist, Gustav Klimt, whose symbolist paintings also combined daring psycho-sexual subject matter with sumptuous backgrounds. Contorted into an audacious tantric pose of intertwined limbs and symbolic gestures, the two-headed woman within Hard Wet also evokes two unusual works of art: the curiously erotic, School of Fontainebleau painting of Gabrielle d'Estrées and one of her sisters from 1594, and British sculptor Mark Quinn’s 2006 sculpture of model Kate Moss tangled in a complicated yoga posture.
Despite sharing the same wide watery eyes, these poised and tight-lipped protagonists are far removed from the childlike beings of Barton’s earliest drawings. Sharing a steely impenetrable expression with the other figures from her world, her many hands are held up to the face(s), caressing her own pale flesh. These ‘fluttering hands’ appear frequently in Barton’s works, conferring a certain spiritual or sacred atmosphere, a quasi-medieval mysticism.1 Sporting only patchworked socks, and feathered and furry cuffs on arms and legs, Barton’s mature beings accumulate otherworldly attributes that signify their belonging to an alternate vivid phantasmagorical world. Evoking the whimsical tiny asteroid home of The Little Prince, her pink orb is more than just a pedestal. Botanical tendrils and veins of bright blue, yellow and scarlet snake from its core to pierce her body and entwine the twin torsos, nourishing her and creating a symbiotic relationship between her body and the broader environment. Yet, for all these eye-catching details, the subjects of this painting appear resolute and unemotional, gazing, statically transfixed in a trance-like state.
A painting of strange and unknowable rebellious beauty, Hard Wet was described by the artist as ‘A work at play with the poetics and muscularity of private spaces. This she-beast could be understood as a warrior defending and preserving the kaleidoscopic power within the galaxies of our inner lives, both real and imagined.’2 A powerful and polychromatic embrace of otherworldly feminine power, this painting was initially purchased by Australian fashion photographer, Darren Tieste, who like Barton, can be counted amongst Australia’s most respected creative ambassadors.
1. Wallis, P., ‘Matrix of Desire’, Del Kathryn Barton, The Highway is a Disco, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 2017, p. 5
2. Cabiscol, L., 'Del Kathryn Barton – From Australia to Berlin', Metal Magazine, June 2017, see: https://metalmagazine.eu/post/del-kathryn-barton-from-australia-to-berlin (accessed 16 October 2024)
LUCIE REEVES-SMITH