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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

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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