Arndt Art Agency

DEL KATHRYN BARTON NGV 2017

i-D, Magazine, Vice, For Del Kathryn Barton, art is a lifeline, 23 November 2017

Installation views of Del Kathryn Barton: The Highway is a Disco at the Ian Potter Centre:
NGV Australia, 17 November 2017 – 12 March 2018. Photo: Tom Ross © Tom Ross

Dallas Art Dealers Association, Largest ever Del Kathryn Barton exhibition opens at the National Gallery of Victoria, 19 November 2017

ABC online, Conversation Hour with Jon Faine, The Conversation Hour: Peter Carey, Chris Jagger, Charlie Hart, and Del Kathryn Barton, 16 November 2017

10 Magazine, Del Kathryn Barton: NGV exhibition, 17 November 2017

Arts Review, Del Kathryn Barton: The Highway is a Disco, 14 November 2017

Herald Sun, Artist Del Kathryn Barton inspires NGV exhibition, Romance was Born collection, 16 November 2017

The Guardian,
Del Kathryn Barton's fertile universe: 'The naked body is so many things', 16 November 2017

Perthnow, Del Kathryn Barton's major new exhibitions honours the mother who never got to see it, 20 November 2017

The Conversation, Del Kathryn Barton explores powerful female sexuality but reproduces the male gaze, 20 November 2017

Vogue Australia, Del Kathryn Barton explains her favourite works from her new National Gallery of Victoria exhibition ,17 November 2017

PRESS

DEL KATHRYN BARTON

THE HIGHWAY IS A DISCO

Solo exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria, Federation Square, Melbourne, Australia

17.11.17 - 12.03.18
Opening | Thursday | October 16 2017, 6 – 8 pm

Arndt Art Agency (A3) is pleased to announce Del Kathryn Barton's solo exhibition The Highway is a Disco.

Two-time Archibald prize-winner Del Kathryn Barton is being celebrated in the largest ever exhibition of her work to date at NGV Australia. Del Kathryn Barton: The Highway is a Disco will feature 150 new and recent works by Barton, including her famed kaleidoscopic portraits, a never-before-seen large-scale sculpture in homage to her mother and Barton's short film RED, starring Australian actress and Academy Award-winner Cate Blanchett.

‘With a practice spanning art, fashion and film, Barton’s psychedelic images reveal her personal responses to the human experience. She is one of Australia's most popular artists, renowned for her highly intricate and distinctive hybrid forms, that break down boundaries between humans and nature’, said Tony Ellwood, Director, NGV. This show is deeply personal for Barton with the debut of her new sculpture, at the foot of your love, which has been created in response to her mother’s terminal illness. Completed in 2017 and comprised of printed silk and Huon pine, the sculpture is reflective of Barton’s reoccurring themes of motherhood and nature. Featuring a wooden conch shell and an enormous silk ‘handkerchief’, the work is symbolic of Barton’s grief for her own mother.

Comprised of five panels and over 10 metres in length, sing blood-wings sing is Barton’s newest and largest painting to date. The painting features a female-focused reimagining of the 1963 Peter, Paul and Mary coming-ofage song, Puff the Magic Dragon. Barton often listens to the folk tune whilst working in her studio as a symbolic reminder to maintain her childlike curiosity through her artistic practice. Barton’s interpretation of the song and its meaning is depicted by four breasted, rainbow coloured dragons. In her signature style, she blurs human, mythological and animal representations in art, encouraging her audience to see how imagination and desire can test traditional forms.

The exhibition will also feature Barton’s acclaimed film RED, where Cate Blanchett plays a mother re-enacting the redback spider's deadly mating ritual, alongside actor Alex Russell, Sydney Dance Company's Charmene Yap and Barton’s own daughter Arella. In RED Barton conveys the strength of women, the visceral power of female sexuality and encapsulates Barton’s multiple interests in feminism, nature and the maternal figure.

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. She won her first Archibald prize in 2008 for her self-portrait with her two children and then again in 2013 for her portrait of Australian actor Hugo Weaving.