Anna Platten: the devil is in the detail

In celebration of the South Australian Living Artists Festival (SALA), the Gallery is recognising the work of one of Australia's greatest contemporary figure painters.

Anna Platten has been actively painting and teaching in Adelaide for more than thirty years and this will be the first comprehensive survey of her highly coveted work.

The display will include numerous loans from private collections and will feature the Gallery's much-loved painting Woman and man embrace, 1992. This highly charged large double portrait of Platten and her new husband demonstrates the self-exploration, complex constructs and desires that would define her work in the following decades. This special exhibition will also be the first showing of the Gallery's newly acquired Ourselves as Zoe. A dream, a web, a puzzle, 2011, which explores themes of mortality and unrequited love.

This special event will reveal Platten as a virtuosic painter of such universal themes as the passing of youth and beauty, motherhood and the ever-changing dynamic of human relationships. Platten's extraordinary realist approach to her work lures her viewers into strangely familiar worlds that point to the often unknown and fragile nature of our own lives.