Dean Home is regarded as one of Australia’s foremost painters of the still life genre, an interest that began for him after seeing Caravaggio’s c.1593 ‘Boy with a Basket of Fruit’ at the Villa Borghese in Rome.

Colour and chiaroscuro are constant hallmarks of his work, as well as a developing understanding of Chinese culture and the careful appropriation of Chinoiserie. Home’s paintings involve multiple picture planes that juxtapose still life, landscape and narratives incorporated in carefully placed artifacts - in contemporary parlance, the ‘picture in picture’ tool that, for Home, is a blend of East and West.

“I want my painting to be evidently interested in things of the world. Years ago, I bought a beautiful, small paperback on the work of Tang period Chinese poet Po Chü-i, which made me place compositions more deliberately. The object, such as a bowl, becomes a kind of cultural site, the flowers a beauty device, and the foreground objects – such as a blue paintbrush, rocks, or handmade cups – are about the path of water, which is a manifestation of wisdom. If you’re lucky, your own brush will carry that wisdom to the picture. I only use objects that help to extend that metaphor. That’s what I’m really interested in doing in Search for the Pearl – these compositions are a short, assembled poem; lyrics that join together, to do with where the path of wisdom might be.”*

Search for the Pearl is Dean Home’s first solo exhibition with Linton & Kay Galleries.

*(Sophia Halloway, Art Almanac, August 2022)