Del Kathryn Barton

(B. 1972)

Come Forth with Love, 2004

Footnotes

PROVENANCE
Ray Hughes Gallery, Sydney
Private collection, Perth

Born in 1972 in Sydney, Australia, Del Kathryn Barton is one of Australia's most acclaimed artists working today. Barton is the only woman to have twice won the prestigious Archibald Prize from the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, in 2008 and 2013 and in 2017 had her first major retrospective, 'The Highway is a Disco' was staged at the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne.

The painting of Del Kathryn Barton is a door to a 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. Del Kathryn Barton's meticulous mark making overwhelms in Come Forth with Love, 2004, with every stroke, dot and run of paint merging into and emerging from each other across the surface of the canvas. An unabashed attention to the decorative is typical of Barton's practice, tracing a lineage to the reclaiming of women's domestic craft in some feminist practices as well as to contemporary fashion and design.

In Come Forth with Love the decorative and feminine are entangled with psycho-sexual impulses which weave through the visual elements of her work. The detailed abundance of paint and fecund imagery have something in common with the obsessiveness and at times disturbing subject matter of the work of Egon Schiele, but the deliberate beauty of Barton's work beguiles more than it unsettles. This attention to beauty and surface recalls the work of Gustav Klimt, whose portraits are similarly rich in both imagery and pigment.