Exhibition themes
The works in the exhibition are gathered into themes.
Click a theme title to your right to view them.

A world of colour

Richard Larter has long enjoyed a fascination with luminous colour and pattern-making. Since the 1960s his vibrant non-figurative paintings have been inspired by a range of sources including various colour theories, physics, maths, musical rhythms and natural phenomena.

Over the years Larter has painted both abstract and figurative works but for a time in the 1980s he decided to focus mainly on showing non-figurative works. As he wrote in 1983:

In the 1980s I have stopped exhibiting figurative works as I believe that the art public has become so polarised by polemic critical viewpoints  …

My abstract works are much more malerisch [painterly] in an obvious manner, and I find complete satisfaction in working in this mode, when many who had worked completely in this mode are now flirting with new figuration. I have always preferred to work quietly in an unfashionable area, where I am unlikely to be influenced by transient trends. Using rollers and trimmers to make marks, I am finding vast unexplored tracts of painting opening before me, and I look forward to the next decade with keen anticipation.