Swamp Op – Brent Harris

‘Swamp Op’ combines evenly pitched opposites. Pulling these poles into their ‘Swamp Op’ unity is the work of Brent Harris, an artist whose obliquely figurative prints, paintings and drawings spin around an endless mutation of forms that give pictorial voice to layers of personal, sexual, existential and biological trauma we experience as humans. All of which unfolds within a keen awareness of the inevitable point of death which awaits us.
Curator: Robert Cook.

Catalogue of an exhibition held at the Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth, 22 January – 5 June 2006.

34 p. : col. ill. ; 22 x 24 cm. Bibliography: p. 28. #0921
Brent Harris was born in Palmerston North, New Zealand and gained a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Victorian College of Arts in Melbourne in 1984. His paintings and works on paper are brooding, dripping swamplands delineated in the most meticulous way. Stark planes, often black and white, belie the swooping organic gestures and expressionist shapes. ‘Many of his forms vibrate, rise and fall, and cause the viewers’ eye much exercise in following them’, noted James Mollison in Art and Australia recently. But what surprises most is the sensuality of the work; as though the sharp lines and immaculate surfaces can barely contain the emotions brooding beneath. This is the unconscious meshed with a taut, graphic sensibility.