Art travels, or it does not – in the latter case, often unjustly. Artists known in one country are not always visible beyond it, just as national cultures of literature and music often develop and remain supported entirely from within. This does not mean, however, that the artists, writers, and musicians themselves are untravelled, nor that their individual practices evolve in ignorance of what is happening elsewhere.

Brent Harris might be judged one such artist, a painter and printmaker whose work is known chiefly in Aotearoa New Zealand, where he was born in 1956, and Australia, where he was trained and has lived since graduating from art school. Despite his travels and residencies overseas and appearances in group shows in Europe, Harris has not yet enjoyed the level of international recognition that he so clearly deserves. The Art Gallery of South Australia’s new exhibition ‘Brent Harris: Surrender & Catch’ (mounted in partnership with the TarraWarra Museum of Art, where a first iteration of the exhibition was on display earlier in 2023-24), along with an accompanying volume edited by curator Maria Zagala, offers a compelling retrospective of this singular artist’s work, making what might be considered a case for acclaim, and one that I found convincing.

Zagala’s long central essay in the elegant and intelligent companion volume charts the trajectory of Harris’s career and his exceptionally varied influences. With great insight and subtlety, Zagala and the other contributors contextualise the work, offering informed analyses of a four-decade-long career. Zagala’s description of Harris’s sustained practices in meditation and automatic drawing, as well as his experience in psychotherapy, allows us to understand the work in terms of its engagement with inheritances of Modernism, and Surrealism more specifically. Harris has explained that ‘[t]he idea of surrender and catch’, drawn from the work of sociologist Kurt H. Wolff, is that ‘you must “surrender” to what is happening’ and be ‘ready to “catch” what is thrown up by the subconscious and the working process – letting things bubble to the surface without too many preconceived ideas, prefiguring the outcome’.

Brent Harris born Palmerston North, New Zealand 4 October 1956 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

For Harris, the result of this psychological process is a body of work that attains the visual sensibility of an ongoing dream state. Logic is subordinated to affect, figuration erupts in a field of abstraction, while figures, shapes, and themes recur like shapeshifting spectres, haunting the works. Two abstract paintings, Weeping Woman and House (both 1987 and among the earliest pieces in the exhibition), help us see some of the origins of Harris’s core visual vocabulary. Here already are the circular forms that he refines over time, evolving them into a variable bullseye shape that operates as both abstract and figurative symbol in later canvases. These two early paintings are also testaments to the traumas of an unhappy childhood and anticipate thematically the stylised figuration of the Grotesquerie series (2001-2, 2007-9), in which a horned father figure, sometimes presented with phallic red tongue, and an eyeless blonde mother appear singly and together in a contrapuntal and deeply disturbing dance of forms. Curator Leigh Robb included some of these pieces in the 2020 AGSA Biennial, Monster Theatres, where I first encountered Harris’s work.

In Laurence Simmons’s essay on monstrosity, in Zagala’s volume, he describes the father of the Grotesquerie works as a ‘horned, devilish’ figure; this is undoubtedly right, but I could not help also recalling the demonic rabbit Frank of Richard Kelly’s cult film Donnie Darko (2001), or the figures in David Lynch’s 2002 short horror films Rabbits (which returned in Inland Empire [2006]). This is not to imply trajectories of influence, but rather to identify a moment when a certain variety of anthropomorphic form returns in culture more widely. In this case, it might suggest an atavistic response to the anxieties specific to a period when our humanity is once again called into question, when the boundaries between the human and animal, the canny and uncanny, again reveal their permeability and arbitrariness. In Harris’s work, such dynamics appear vividly present, unsettling the viewer by exploring histories of personal trauma in ways that have broad resonance.

Zagala explains that ‘Harris’s own understanding of his compositions is that they are generally autobiographical and narrative-driven’, while his ‘deeply personal … psychological excavations are often undertaken through a formal vocabulary that directly quotes from other artists’. She notes as examples of this citational approach the influence of New Zealand artist Colin McCahon, Americans Philip Guston, John Wesley, and Myron Stout, as well as Franco-American Louise Bourgeois, whom Harris met in the late 1980s. The AGSA exhibition places Harris’s work in direct visual conversation with prints from Bourgeois and other artists whose works have been important for Harris, including Edvard Munch and contemporary American artist Kiki Smith.

Brent Harris in his Melbourne studio (photograph by Andrew Curtis)

These influences are often readily apparent in Harris’s works, as are those of a great many other artists mentioned in the book and curatorial notes, including Willem de Kooning and Mike Kelley, but also, more surprisingly, Edgar Degas, Jacopo Pontormo, and Raphael. Confronted with Harris’s haunting dark-field monotypes from The Fall series (made after Harris encountered Degas’s monotypes), I found myself thinking of works from Goya’s Disasters of War, while Harris’s handling of paint in The reassembled self paintings brought to mind Cy Twombly’s largely green and white Bassano in Teverina canvases at the Menil Collection in Houston and some of his later and vividly polychromatic works, such as the Quattro Stagioni series in Tate Modern.

Like Twombly, Harris is an artist whose sexuality is a key context for the work without its operating as a limiting lens. Rather than ‘queer artists’, both Twombly and Harris might better be understood as ‘artists who happen to be queer’. This subtle distinction expands the interpretative field without requiring that their works speak exclusively to a fixed identity category. For Harris, this context is most pertinent, perhaps, in his monumental response to the AIDS pandemic: the early series of paintings and prints The Stations (1989), inspired by the Stations of the Cross. Informed by his knowledge of Ad Reinhardt’s black-on-black paintings, Barnett Newman’s landmark The Stations of the Cross / Lema Sabachthani (1958-66), and McCahon’s The Fourteen Stations of the Cross (1966), Harris’s works are at once visibly influenced by these precursors as much as they make a unique and intensely affecting contribution of their own. The AGSA exhibition includes all fourteen prints and three of the paintings (the full series is scattered across multiple collections), while including all fourteen works in Harris’s more figurative return to this subject in the era of the Covid pandemic.

Art historian Helen Hughes argues in her contribution to Zagala’s volume that ‘Harris’s works and their art-historical references are … indivisible’, reminding us too that his ‘mode of citation has little in common with the cool irony of the appropriation art movements of the late 1970s and early 1980s’. In Harris’s world, we are refreshingly far removed from the impulses that lie behind the work of such global superstars as David Salle or Jeff Koons. Rather, Harris seems invested in continuing to probe the juncture of Surrealist compositional practices with evocations of troubling personal experiences that activate the repressed, the dark, the traumatic, but also the playful and anarchic. To spend time with Harris’s work is to discover an artist possessed both of a remarkable command of his materials and an enviable knowledge of the field. Whatever he does next seems destined to surprise.

Brent Harris: Surrender & Catch continues at the Art Gallery of South Australian until 20 October 2024.