brent harris - ngv · 14 15 with spectator: paradigm of a metaphor for existence – by the german...
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Brent Harris is an artist who is acutely aware of
the emotional and intellectual possibilities that
his chosen mediums of painting, printmaking and
drawing can offer. Attentive to the potential of colour,
shape, line and form to express complex intuitions,
he has addressed a range of extreme states of
human experience and emotion in his works. Fear,
doubt, death, sexuality, identity, the body, religion
and spirituality are themes that he has returned to
throughout a rich and complex oeuvre – ideas that
he has filtered through haunting imagery that is often
as confronting as it is seductive.
Over a career of more than twenty-five years,
Harris has constantly challenged his own approach
to image-making. The unique position he occupies
in Australian contemporary art is due in part to his
capacity for continual transformation. His openness
to the possibility of both chance and change has
been a powerful force that has allowed Harris to push
his practice into new territories, evident in a creative
output that has been marked by a number of radical
shifts and turns. Embracing a broad range of poten-
tial influences has also played an important role.
His profound interest in art history and engagement
with the work of other artists – from Michelangelo
to Mike Kelley – have formed important points of
ref erence for his own art. Equally sustaining has
been his interest in a wide range of philosophical
and psychological concepts that together with an
increasing focus on personal memories and feel-
ings have provided him with powerful catalysts for
artistic expression.
This exhibition assembles works spanning
more than two decades that represent significant
turning points in the artist’s career. Drawn from the
collection of the National Gallery of Victoria with
the addition of a small number of private loans, it
brings together more than eighty works that chart
Harris’s artistic evolution. From his earliest works
on paper to his most recent paintings, the exhibition
follows the development of his idiosyncratic visual
language, exploring a number of themes and motifs
that have recurred throughout his paintings, prints
and drawings, and exposing the complex layers
of meaning that underpin them. It looks closely
at the role of drawing and printmaking and their
relationship to his painting practice, offering an
opportunity to consider connections that emerge
between works that in some cases have been
produced many years apart.
Mirror #2 2004hand-coloured paper pulpNational Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
1514
with Spectator: Paradigm of a Metaphor for
Existence – by the German philosopher Hans
Blumenberg with inspiring Drift. Originally titled
Shipwrecked, the suite of prints developed from
a number of rough sketches that Harris made
while in New York in 1997. Kippenberger’s book,
The Canary Searching for a Port in the Storm –
‘a small book of mad doodles … all abstract, chaotic,
wonderful’, as Harris has described it – inspired
within him a sense of freedom. ‘For me they were
a liberating mess’, he wrote, ‘and not a single canary
in sight’.11 Together with Blumenberg’s text, in
which sea voyages and shipwrecks are explored
as metaphors for life’s journey, it gave Harris the
impetus to create the series of prints.
Drift is unusual in the artist’s oeuvre not only
for its amorphous qualities and boundless sense
of space, but also in that it did not follow a series of
paintings, existing only as a set of prints. A suite
of etchings titled The view from the bottom of the
well, 1996, by Louise Bourgeois gave him the idea
to translate his New York drawings into this form.
Usually Harris produces prints either in conjunction
with paintings (as with The Stations), or following the
completion of a series. The pair of colour woodcuts
The Untimely no. 3 and The Untimely no. 7, 1998,
(below left to right)The Untimely no. 3 1998The Untimely no. 7 1998colour woodcutNational Gallery of Victoria, MelbournePresented through the NGV Foundation from the Athol Hawke and Eric Harding Collection of Contemporary Prints and Drawings, Fellow, 2004