Brent Harris: The Other Side

Brent Harris is well known for haunting imagery that is often charged with an emotional intensity. Over a career of more than four decades, Harris has developed a significant body of work including paintings, prints and drawings that address universal concerns such as desire, sexuality, familial relationships, mortality, identity and spirituality.

Born in Palmerston North in 1956, Harris moved to Melbourne in 1981 to study at the Victorian College of the Arts and he has lived there ever since. In 2016, following the death of his father, he felt able to return to his country of birth after an absence of several decades. It was an episode in his life that resulted in an intense period of artistic production.

Brent Harris: The Other Side, guest curated by Jane Devery, is the first major survey exhibition of the artist’s work to be held in Aotearoa New Zealand. It includes recent works that reflect the artist’s reconnection with Aotearoa as well as paintings and prints drawn from his most important series of works dating from the late 1980s to the present.

Image credit: Brent Harris, Listener, 2018, oil on linen, on loan from Patricia Mason and Paul Walker, Melbourne, © the artist.