The Other Side is an epic homecoming for expatriate New Zealand artist Brent Harris. Hamish Coney reviews the show.
Aotearoa New Zealand is writ large across the 44 canvases, the earliest of which dates to 1988, that comprise Harris’ career survey exhibition which opened recently at the Auckland Art gallery Toi o Tāmaki. Harris’ swamps, forests and mountains appear ‘awe-fully’ familiar. Amongst the artist’s formative memories is gazing northward from the rooftop of his childhood home in the Manawatu. On a clear day, in the distance, the snow capped peaks of both Ruapehu and Mount Taranaki could be clearly seen.
Over the past 40 odd years the Melbourne-based painter and printmaker has become one of Australia’s leading painters, his work collected by major public galleries in Australasia as well as the British Museum. But his brooding yet life-affirming canvases remain something of an unknown pleasure for audiences this side of the Tasman.
This absence was highlighted in recent correspondence with Harris’ Wellington gallerist Robert Heald, who has been instrumental in the artist’s re-engagement with his homeland in recent years, “It struck me as a peculiar situation for a senior artist from New Zealand, whose work remains highly informed by their formative years here and engaged with the country’s art history, to be largely unknown on a national level.”
I first encountered Harris’ work in 2002, on a visit to his Sydney representative at that time Kaliman Gallery. Grotesquerie was the title of that exhibition and it featured tall, looming canvases of menacing, masked figures and globular emanations welling up from the recesses of the subconscious. Those signature crepuscular, inky blacks shot through with livery shades of maroon or creamy, custardy yellows were, and are, both enticing and baleful, bitter and sweet, yin and yang. I recall being curiously reassured that this was such a resonant New Zealand voice. Amidst the confident noisiness of the Australian art scene and palette, here was a more diffident, darker and, for me, comforting voice.
I’ve followed Harris’ progress ever since, often wondering why his work was so little known here. I soon discovered that there were powerful and personal reasons for his exile. It’s complicated and relates to family, sexuality and a personal sense of safety. Australia provided for Harris, as it has for so many from Aotearoa, a place of sanctuary. The Lucky Country is to be thanked for its welcome and warmth. Harris, has, since the early 1980s, clearly flowered. The Other Side, although traversing so much difficult ground, unfolds as a suite of the most affecting and ravishing blooms.
In recent years he has gradually re-established contact with Aotearoa, via a handful of exhibitions at his Wellington representative gallery Robert Heald and in 2019 an exhibition of his prints at the Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū, entitled Towards the Swamp.
Dreams, nightmares and the persistence of memory is Harris’ terroir. But the added tinctures of the metaphysical and his early experiences in Aotearoa together with the lurking influence of Colin McCahon, first seen by Harris as a teenager in the 1970s, will be recognised by New Zealand audiences.
Born in Palmerston North in 1956, Harris hightailed it to Melbourne in 1981 to study at the Victoria College of Art. His journey to this point is worth telling as it provides much material, both autobiographical and art historical, that informs the paintings we see in The Other Side. His upbringing was claustrophobic and in retrospect inspiring in unequal measure as the artist noted in a conversation a few days before the exhibition opened, “our own demons are often the most savage”.
Harris grew up in the early 70s Manawatu. His father and wider family was involved in the building trade. Harris recalls working on the fit-out of a small gallery above a framing shop in Palmerston North as being one of his formative experiences and an introduction to art. He also recalls the simple advice of a local artist at that time, to read everything about art he could lay his hands on at the library. Harris cites modern German artist Paul Klee (1879–1940) and impressionists Camille Pissaro (1830–1903) and Alfed Sisley (1839–1899) as early discoveries.
And although Harris is candid about his troubled relationship with his father, he does credit a paternal influence in his art education. That the artist only felt he was able to re-engage with his homeland after the death of his father in 2016 tells you pretty much all you need to know. However, Harris family road trips always involved a trip to a public art gallery in New Plymouth, Whanganui or Wellington.
It was on these forays that Harris encountered works by artists that he can recall to this day including Olivia Spencer-Bower, Frances Hodgkins, Gretchen Albrecht and Colin McCahon.
At the age of 19, Harris married his high-school sweetheart and appeared set for a traditional family life and working as a builder. Weekends were spent hunting. Harris’ father was president of the local deerstalking club and the artist was familiar with guns as a young man.
But doubts began creeping in. Harris was questioning his life path when he saw an advertisement for a presentation by the Inner Peace Movement. Soon after, at the invitation of the presenter of the evening, Harris relocated to Auckland and embraced both his gay sexuality and the urban art scene at the time. He took a weekend job at the Auckland Art Gallery bookshop and was a regular visitor to the Elam Art School library. He also recalls the warmth and generous nature of the dealer Petar Vuletic as well as voraciously reading the latest copies of Art Forum magazine which could be freely accessed at the American Embassy. Harris was still working as a builder, or as a shift-worker at nights at the telephone exchange, so his days were free to concentrate on his painting. At around this time, a well-connected Auckland lawyer suggested that Harris might consider attending art school, perhaps even in Australia. In 1981, Harris moved to Melbourne and, after preparing an entrance portfolio, was accepted into the Victorian College of the Arts, where the Australian painter Peter Booth was a lecturer and acknowledged influence.
But Aotearoa New Zealand was not far from his thoughts, in particular the legacy of Colin McCahon, whose 1947 canvas The Family, in the collection of Te Manawa Palmerston North Art Gallery Harris cites as a formative part of his art education.
Harris is remarkably candid about the wider artistic sources he refers to in his thinking and preparation as he circles a subject. He even consciously name-checks these sources in his titles, in effect asking the viewer to compare and contrast his work with his points of departure. One such work is the very first a visitor to The Other Side encounters, Here we give thanks to Kelly which dates to 1988 and Harris’ first significant exhibition post art school. The ‘Kelly’ in question is the American abstract artist Ellsworth Kelly (1923-2015), best known for his large scale, abstract ‘simple shapes’. But the text in the homage comes directly from a work by McCahon held in the collection of the Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki which dates to 1961, Here I give thanks to Mondrian. So we have four artists in the mix. It’s a game of fanboy ping-pong, both self-conscious and self-effacing, the two New Zealand artists wondering out loud about their place in the scheme of things. Harris sits at the end of the chain, pointing to McCahon, the elephant in the room, “I had to get around him. He’s always there. Every time I do the black and white thing, he’s there!”
There’s an actual elephant, or an arrangement of one in Appalling Moment (1996). Elsewhere we encounter what writer and curator Robert Leonard has described as ‘Gandalf’ figures. These observers bear witness to the misty goings-on in the dreamscapes of The Other Side, their sanguine responses create a calming mood, much as I experienced on my first meeting with the Grotesqueries over 20 years ago.
Like so much of the iconography in Harris’ work, for example the looming mountains in a canvas such as Peaks (2019), these elements and characters, though monumental facilitate a safe space for both dread and wonder – or in the case of the intriguing Appalling Moment, the sublime and the ridiculous.
Interpreting the sweet spot of a Harris work is a trick, in which the viewer’s own POV is an activated partner, asked to play, even flushed out onto the dance floor of one’s own psyche. So searching for an objective measure may be a futile exercise, one perhaps at odds with the more phlegmatic reaches of your character. However, a sensitive appreciation of mood, a disposition inclined towards reflection and an appreciation for the sincerity of the artist’s inclination to share his (mostly) friendly ghosts might prove to be a tonic for a bruised soul or a friend in need.
These are themes the exhibition curator and longtime champion Jane Devery highlighted when I asked her to isolate a defining theme or leitmotif in Harris career, “Harris' deeply resonant paintings address universal questions about what it means to be human in the present moment. The exhibition brings to light a number of his principal themes including the idea of searching for the self and the potential for art to address the unknown, or that which cannot be articulated in words. It emphasises, in particular, psychological tensions and childhood trauma associated with the artist's experience of growing up in Aotearoa, as well as his re-connection with his country of birth in recent years.”
If you might need further coaxing, I recommend these considered thoughts by Robert Heald, “I think the unique atmosphere of Brent’s work owes a lot to its unexpected mixture of emotional tones and its folding of the psychological into the formal. The work might at first glance might seem playful, almost comic, but is concerned with quite serious and, at times, traumatic subject matter. And regardless of the subject matter the work typically retains a certain formal independence and ability to function on a purely visual, almost abstract, level. Whatever subconscious states the work might be dealing with, it always looks good.”
So, do yourself a favour and take a trip to The Other Side.
Brent Harris: The Other Side at the Auckland Art gallery Toi o Tāmaki until September 17
