Brent Harris: Surrender & Catch
The exhibition Brent Harris: Surrender & Catch brings together over one hundred paintings, drawings, studies and prints from 35 years of the artist’s career, mapping the development of his artistic practice and the shifts that led to his distinctive painterly style. Moving between figuration and abstraction, humour and the grotesque, psychological subject matter relating to the human condition and the visualisation of his personal complex and contradictory feelings, Harris draws on sociologist Kurt Heinrich Wolff’s concept of ‘surrender and catch’ as both a process for self-analysis and a method of working. The experience of the body and desire, faith and childhood memories of porous familial relationships are expressed in the ambiguous forms derived from Harris’ use of the surrealist technique of automatic drawing to access unconscious imagery. This generative methodology was developed by working concurrently across painting, printmaking and drawing, and a cross-pollination of imagery and forms across mediums is evident in the exhibition, which also includes prints by artists who have had a significant influence on Harris’s work: Louise Bourgeois, Edvard Munch and Kiki Smith. At TarraWarra Museum of Art until March 11, 2024, Surrender & Catch then travels to the Art Gallery of South Australia from July 6 to October 20, 2024.
