Del Kathryn Barton’s sumptuously patterned portraits of women and chimeric beings explore competing representations of female vulnerability and power. Included in of her own nature, Barton’s first solo exhibition in London, I loved you like a flower… so softly so tender, 2023, belongs to an ongoing series within her oeuvre, ever evolving with the incorporation of new artistic techniques. With individual variants developed in a serial format, Barton presents here a direct, almost formal, portrait with a psychedelic profusion of colour and riotous decoration. These mature stylised portraits have drawn inspiration from portraiture of the fashionable elite in the High Renaissance, often undercut with the unsettled eroticism of modern European artists, such as Egon Schiele and Louise Bourgeois. Despite sharing the same wide watery eyes, Barton’s poised avatars are far removed from the childlike beings of her earlier works. Although they have aged alongside the artist, they retain the otherworldly attributes which signify their belonging to an alternate and intoxicating fantasy world.

Within the group of paintings presented by Barton in her solo exhibition in Cromwell Place, a heritage-listed Victorian townhouse complex in London’s South Kensington district, the figure in I loved you like a flower… so softly so tender is surprisingly human-like in her appearance and proportions, bearing no sprouting feathers or fur, scaly appendages or exaggerated facial features. Save for a fringed, shaggy black bob reminiscent of American punk-rocker Joan Jett, the woman’s facial features are largely anonymous, sharing the translucent complexion, high cheekbones, hooded eyes and Cupid’s-bow lips of her sisterly companions on canvas and paper. With a bold, alternating striped dazzle pattern, her striking and sculptural ruff neckline recalls the stiff neck ornaments of previous iterations of these portraits, in particular Barton’s acclaimed ‘Satellite Fade-Out’ series.

A key feature of Del Kathryn Barton’s mesmerising and idiosyncratic work is her skilled combination of different mediums within one painting – from wandering ink contours to graduated, dripping watercolour washes and delicate veils of shimmering dots obsessively painted throughout the background and over the top of the finished work. Her Klimt-like all-over patterning within the backgrounds, bodies, and accoutrements of her figures often extends beyond the canvas to become a Gesamtkunstwerk, a total work of art. This harmonious aesthetic totality has recently stretched to include hand-painted frames, here spray-painted with alternating stripes of orange, red and lilac to reinforce those same hues appearing throughout the main composition.

As Julie Ewington has noted, the figures in Barton’s paintings ‘are always gazing either out of the canvas at the viewer or scanning their world’, there is ‘an insistence on watchfulness.’¹ No less an enchantress than the nameless, terrifying creatures of busier compositions, this woman holds the viewer’s gaze with unnatural and unwavering focus.

Curator Pip Wallis noted that ‘like poetry, her [Barton’s] fiercely non-didactic texts are open to radically subjective and diverse understandings.’² The artist’s scattered subconscious jottings, however, often evoke ideas of Romantic longing and transcendent sensual experiences. Accentuating the frank gaze down her nose, here the figure’s elegant hands are clasped together in a gesture of appraisal. Tattooed along the edges of her fingers is Barton’s poetic and confessional title, I loved you like a flower… so softly so tender, providing an earnest and vulnerable tenor to the figure’s interaction with the viewer.

1. Ewington, J., Del Kathryn Barton, Piper Press, Sydney, 2014, pp. 37, 47
2. Wallis, P., ‘Matrix of Desire’, Del Kathryn Barton: Highway is a Disco, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 2017, p. 9

LUCIE REEVES-SMITH