British painter Roberta Booth died in 2014. You’ve probably never heard of her. I’d never heard of her. Which is what makes this show of her creepy, domestically-themed paintings from the early ’70s to the early ’80s such a rare privilege: the opportunity to discover a genuinely original artist, with no backstory.
That’s not to say that Booth constitutes some kind of ‘outsider artist’ (whatever that means anymore). She was an academic; she had numerous solo and group shows; she just never quite made it into the canon, so she’s stayed in the past. Looks like this is changing. This show has pretty much sold out.
Booth’s stock in trade – in this era of her career at least – is hardware: bathroom and kitchen fittings, door and window locks, and household objects like typewriters (hey, it was the ’70s). There’s a discombobulating view through a cheese grater. Many of the items are oddly sexualised, such as a detumescent tap teetering above a pool of water. They wouldn’t look out of place on the cover of a JG Ballard book, if JG Ballard had been commissioned to do a catalogue for B&Q. What gives Booth’s paintings their power, though, is their ambivalence. This is not a mechanised hell, but it is a world full of menace and ominous contrasts. These are the products of the twentieth century, in all their glittering purchasability, literally the hinges of the world. They stand in their placid landscapes like sculptures, but they are also animated: maybe this is a future where hedge pruners are the master race.
Booth’s work invites a range of comparisons and influences: Bacon’s troubling environments, the fetish furniture of Allen Jones, the domestic spectres of Louise Bourgeois. But her painting has a wholly unique atmosphere, at once beguiling and nightmarish. And it’s pretty startling.
