Talk: Brent Harris and the Artists that Influenced His Practice

Speaker/Artist: Brent Harris

Artist Brent Harris will give an illustrated talk about his life, art practice, and art-historical influences such as Colin McCahon, Edvard Munch and Louise Bourgeois. One of Australia’s leading contemporary artists, Harris is well known for his haunting imagery that is charged with emotional and psychological intensity. Through his paintings, prints and drawings, Harris explores themes such as psychology and the subconscious realm; spirituality and religion; narrative and allegory; and the idea of searching for the self. His works dwell somewhere between abstraction and peculiar figuration, incorporating elements of the surreal, such as automatic drawing and uncanny distillation of the figure. Immaculate surfaces, pristine edges and cropped forms are dominant features of his work.

Born in Palmerston North in 1956, Harris moved to Melbourne in 1981. In 2016, following the death of his father, he returned to Aotearoa New Zealand after an absence of several decades. The exhibition Brent Harris: The Other Side is the first major survey exhibition of the artist’s work to be held in Aotearoa. It includes recent works that reflect the artist’s reconnection with his birthplace as well as paintings and prints drawn from his most important series of works dating from the late 1980s to the present.

Brent Harris: The Other Side opens 6 May.

Brent Harris, Peaks (the other side), 2019 oil on linen, collection of Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū