Brent Harris
This New Zealand-born, Melbourne-based artist is the subject of a major survey exhibition, Brent Harris: Surrender & Catch, at the Art Gallery of South Australia.
Image credit: Brent Harris, peaks (vision over Taranaki), 2019, oil on linen, 220 x 160 cm, Collection of David Cleary, Sydney. Photo: Russell Kleyn © Brent Harris
The surrealist movement was a means of building a system of speaking that lay a distance beyond realism. By tapping into the unconscious mind, the surrealists, as imagined by André Breton, hoped to bring hidden desires and fears to the surface. Their ideas were inextricably bound up with the developing world of psychoanalysis. Like the ever-looming Freud, surrealist artists and writers were fascinated by meaning as found in dreams and the subconscious. By delving into the depths of the unconscious mind, they aimed to question established reality and reveal hidden truths about human experience, towards new ways of understanding the structures of the world around them. One hundred years later, looking at the work of Brent Harris, what remains is not specifically the politics of the movement rather its intent and process. Harris draws from the subconscious to conjure his own vocabulary of askance figures within almost familiar landscapes, which speak uniquely to our own reality.
An extensive traveller, richly knowledgeable in the history of art (and painting in particular), his work is his own specific and personal reimagining of our world. Born in Aotearoa/New Zealand in 1956, Harris moved to Melbourne in 1981 to begin his studies, first at Footscray College of TAFE and then at the Victorian College of the Arts. In the catalogue to accompany his latest exhibition, Brent Harris: Surrender & Catch, at the Art Gallery of South Australia, a comprehensive timeline by curator ... Subscribe to read all articles in full
