Victoria Reichelt

Victoria Reichelt
Australian, born 1979; lives and works in Jellurgal/Burleigh Waters, Queensland

Henry (after Betty) 2021
oil on linen
Courtesy of the artist and THIS IS NO FANTASY, Naarm/Melbourne

Artist statement:

Henry (after Betty) is a portrait of my son and a reference to Gerhard Richter’s portrait of his daughter, Betty (1988).

Like Richter, I address the complex relationships between painting and photography, parent and child: the love/hate, push/pull of photograph and paint; the force of wills bound up in looking at and looking away. Despite the child's emphatic visual presence, and the work’s function as portrait, his features and expression are largely unseen, forcing the viewer to look more closely at the details of the painted surface and in a sense, away from who is depicted. The slowness of painting is grounded in seeing the materiality of paint and its manipulation in tandem with what it depicts. Here, the time taken to paint the image, the rendering of each stitch in the beanie, is laboursome and repetitive but also an act of love, much like parenting itself.