Self portrait with pin-up

, 1965

Richard Larter (1929 - 2014), artist, studied art in London and travelled to Algiers before migrating to Australia with his family in 1962. He was soon characterised as an Australian Pop artist for his flat, collage-like paintings, which incorporated brightly coloured painted heads of celebrities, sex symbols, dictators, politicians and porn stars, often represented by his late wife, the performance artist Pat Larter. Larter has also made a significant body of geometric, ethereal and glittery abstract paintings, elements of which have often filled the backgrounds of the figurative works. This painting, featuring an intricate hypodermic syringe technique originally inspired by Arabic calligraphy, contains many of the elements characteristic of Larter's figurative and abstract work.