Forming/Transforming: The Art of Brent Harris

 Brent Harris, Grotesquerie 2008, Melbourne, oil on linen, diptych, 191.0 x 127.0 cm (each panel). Gift of the Art Gallery of South Australia Contemporary Collectors 2008. Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide © Brent Harris.

The talks will explore various aspects of the artist’s singular practice, from his referencing of Biblical narratives to tell his own story, to exploring the motivating impulse behind his citation of artistic sources in his work and his use of automatic drawing to access unconscious imagery. The speakers will consider the dynamic of ‘forming/transforming’ in Harris’s return to subjects and motifs across media and over decades.

The in-conversation will be followed by a short Q&A with the audience and refreshments courtesy of our sponsors.

Entry to the exhibition is included in your forum ticket.

Sunday 11 Feb 3-4:30pm

* Note the talks will take place in our main gallery, which will be closed to the general public from 3pm on this date. Your ticket includes exhibition entry, talks and light refreshments at 4:30pm.

About the speakers

Dr Justin Clemens investigates the rich seam of religious iconography in Harris’s work from The Stations, 1989 and 2020, to depictions of Abraham and Mary Magdalene. His paper considers how, across Harris’s oeuvre, he has consistently drawn upon forms from the history of European art which are not only explicitly illustrative of Biblical figures and events but which further contribute to the interpretation of such figures and events.

Dr Helen Hughes considers the way in which appropriation or citation of other artists’ work is a prominent aspect of Brent Harris’s practice. Although Harris began exhibiting work in Melbourne in the wake of its postmodern moment in the early 1980s – a moment closely associated with Art & Text journal – Harris’s work conveys nothing of the cool irony of so much of this type of postmodern appropriation. What then is the nature of Harris’s appropriation? Helen Hughes attempts to answer this question by drawing on Renaissance art historians Alexander Nagel and Christopher S. Wood’s important book Anachronic Renaissance (2010), which examines the roles of repetition, copying and appropriation in religious art during the Renaissance.

Artist Brent Harris and curator Maria Zagala’s in-conversation focuses on the artist’s interest in subconscious imagery in the making of his work and the role of automatic drawing in the development of his psychologically driven imagery. They will consider how Harris’s methodology has evolved over time to encompass, in recent years, a spontaneous ‘surrender and catch’ approach, as well as the themes to which he has persistently returned: his relationship to death, or ‘the other side’, and memories stored in the body.