Untitled

Peter Booth is one of the key late-twentieth-century Australian artists. Known as a surrealist, his paintings are known to illustrate dark and brooding scenes of nightmarish figures, animals, and landscapes. The son of a steelworker in 1940s England, he was familiar with the industrial landscape of northern England at an early age, which undoubtedly informed his style and subject matter. He attended the Sheffield College of Art before his family emigrated to Australia in 1958. There, Booth worked as a laborer for several years and then entered the National Gallery School in Melbourne. In the early 1970s, Booth painted hard-edged abstractions of dark rectangles, primarily in black to signify social alienation, possibly influenced by the clashing and butting of cultural spheres of laborers and elites. By 1977, however, he had begun working in figurative and landscape imagery as well as abstraction, which he continues to explore today.