“An overriding concern has been a return, again and again, to thinking about the human condition – the craziness we all face in our individual and collective struggles, in attempting to hold our lives together in some meaningful way," says the artist Brent Harris, reflecting on his retrospective show.

Set on the grounds of the Kirsten Thompson Architect’s designed gallery space at the Yarra Valley’s TarraWarra estate winery, this show is a comprehensive exploration of Brent Harris’ artistic oeuvre.

Now in its final weeks, closing Monday 11 March, Brent Harris: Surrender & Catch is a captivating exhibition of a significant contemporary New Zealand artist who has lived and worked in Melbourne (Naarm) for over 40 years.

Curated by Maria Zagala in collaboration with the Art Gallery of South Australia, the retrospective presents a comprehensive exploration of Harris’s artistic journey, featuring over 100 pieces, including paintings, drawings, studies, and prints. The exhibition aims to traverse the evolution of Harris’s style and thematic shifts over his illustrious career, spanning from 1987 to 2022.

Curator Maria Zagala notes the significance of the exhibition, stating, “Developed slowly over the course of many years, this exhibition presents a comprehensive overview of Harris’s formidable career. If the making of art can be seen as a process of excavation, then the circumstances of Brent Harris’s maturation – from a difficult childhood in Aotearoa New Zealand through to his early twenties as a gay man during the onset of the AIDS pandemic in Melbourne – provide the foundation from which his work has emerged over the past four decades.”

Harris himself has reflected on the emotional journey of curating the exhibition, expressing, “To experience 30 years of your past, laid out in images of your own making, is alternately quite emotional, sobering and a bit scary. In considering what the result of a life spent making imagery now looks like, an overriding concern has been a return, again and again, to thinking about the human condition – the craziness we all face in our individual and collective struggles, in attempting to hold our lives together in some meaningful way.”

The exhibition title, Surrender & Catch, draws from sociologist Kurt H. Wolff’s concept, serving as both a process for self-analysis and a method of artistic creation. “My work is a continuing search, vainly perhaps at times, to make meaning. I am endlessly searching for revelation if only expressed in a desire for the next image to be revealed,” elaborates Harris on his creative process.

Harris’s ambiguous forms, rooted in Surrealist techniques like automatic drawing, embody his exploration of unconscious imagery. The exhibition emphasises the cross-pollination of imagery and the development of forms in his printmaking, drawing, and painting practice, featuring prints by influential artists Louise Bourgeois, Edvard Munch, and Kiki Smith.

Closing shortly, the exhibition promises to be a revelatory experience, occupying the expansive spaces of both TarraWarra Museum of Art and showcasing the artist’s evolution over the past four decades.

TarraWarra Museum of Art
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