Grotesquerie

Since the late 1980s the New Zealand-born, Melbourne-based artist Brent Harris has explored the experience of the body and desire, faith (and the question of what follows death), and familial relationships. Working concurrently across painting, printmaking and drawing, Harris has developed a generative methodology, whereby each medium feeds the development of his art in unexpected ways. In the early 1990s Harris moved away from geometric painting and, after a period of experimentation with the surrealist technique of automatic drawing, he began to work in a more figurative mode. His paintings and prints, often conceived in series, addressed unconscious processes and were painted in a bold, pop-inspired style.

In Grotesquerie (1999–2008), a series of twenty-six paintings and ten prints, Harris pictures episodes from his childhood, giving form to memories of sexual development and associated trauma. Harris’s concern with the porous boundaries between children and adults and, likewise, between adults was explored in this group of works, on which Harris worked for over a decade. The figures in the series, identified by the artist as the Father and the Mother, have been described as ‘locked into a dark psychodrama, a dream-world governed by its own rules of logic’. The diptych distills the brutality of their dependence on one another.

Maria Zagala, Associate Curator, Prints, Drawings & Photographs