Richard Larter's art practice has had a significant impact on Australian art over the last fifty years, since his emigration from Britain in 1962. In Australia he has been widely regarded as the 'grandfather of pop art', owing to his mining of pop culture imagery as the source material for his vigorous, original, montage paintings. His art frequently embodies a fierce critique of conventional society and politics, in particular state-sanctioned violence, and hypocritical attitudes to sex. Sex is the wellspring of Larter's art, the thing that gives it heart and renders it life-affirming.

In the late 1960s Larter's figurative practice shifted from single figure works on highly decorative bac...