Brent HARRIS

born 1956, Palmerston North, New Zealand
lives and works Melbourne, Victoria

After completing studies at the Victorian College of the Arts, Brent Harris began exhibiting his work professionally in 1985. Since then Harris has achieved widespread critical acclaim and his work has been included in numerous important surveys of Australian and international contemporary art.

The artwork of Brent Harris is well known for its highly idiosyncratic visual language that has evolved through his ceaseless invention and refinement of form and content, and his meticulous attention to pictorial composition and surface. Fluid, mysterious forms and a quiet emotional intensity has characterized his paintings and works on paper for over a decade.

Over many years, Brent Harris has maintained a solid practice which includes drawing, painting and print making. In fact, drawing is central to Harris’ art. His practice is to take an initial idea through multiple and various exploratory charcoal drawings in which the outlines of certain forms are drawn, repeated, erased and modified. As a final form begins to emerge, more resolved drawings begin to define the colour and spatial qualities that typify Harris’ works. The ambiguity of his organic forms can be unnerving, erotically charged or at times comical and are always in a state of flux between abstraction and figuration. It is in these plays that Harris’ has been able to locate an increasingly personal content in his work. This content sometimes draws on the indescribable emotional states and psychology of human relationships. Harris’ Grotesquerie series is the artist’s most extensive body of work. It could also be argued that the series is also the artist’s most well-known and recognised for its sinister imagery.

The Grotesquerie Series of artworks were created between 2001 and 2002 and then revisited again with a final body of works created in 2007. Like much of the imagery created before it, the Grotesquerie images are loaded with ambiguity. It is quite clear within this series that the images are figurative, and that two of figures are prevalent throughout the series. One is a threatening monster with horns, whose torso appears to envelope the smaller figure of a blonde woman. Harris speaks of these figures as father and mother, thus establishing an archetypal domestic relationship which hints at an upsetting dark secret.

Study for Grotesquerie #16 features the same male and female figures with two additional fluid-like figures which Harris refers to as the siblings. Grotesquerie #16 is one of the largest studies created by Harris and it is also the last study created by the artist before this image was painted on canvas. This study marks the final image to be created in the 2007 Grotesquerie series and it is one of the most complex images from that series.

Other selected artwork acquisitions