Current Projects
No. 22
Born in Palmerston North, New Zealand in 1965, Brent Harris arrived in Australia in 1981 and has become one of Australia's leading contemporary artists.A painter and printmaker, he is renowned for producing works of great emotional intensity and striking graphic quality.
Among the many public institutions that collect his work are the National Gallery of Australia, National Portrait Gallery and all the state galleries. His work was recently included in Out of Australia shown in 2011 at the British Museum, and the National Gallery of Victoria will show his work in an exhibition opening in March 2012.
Brent Harris has been exhibiting since 1988, and during that time his work has undergone many transformations. Over his career, he has evoked as influences the New Zealand artist Colin McCahon, Barnett Newman, Ellsworth Kelly, Ad Reinhardt and Nicolas Poussin, and his work has ranged from abstraction to narrative figural.
The Tapestry
The tapestry is based on No. 22, one of a group of works of charcoal and gouache on board. In these new works, Harris has been producing brightly coloured, almost expressionistic paintings of intimate scale. These paintings are heavily influenced by his three-month residency in 2009 at the Australia Council studio at The British School in Rome. They are extensively worked and reworked, as the artist adds and subtracts from them in equal measure, causing forms to appear and reappear as he works to a final conclusion.
The weavers and the artist are excited to see what the translation of the work into a tapestry will bring to the work's interpretation. One challenge facing the weavers is how to capture the subtlety of the painting's colours using yarn. Another is the scale, creating a tapestry with more than 10 times the surface area of the original work.
The completed tapestry will be exhibited at the Melbourne Art Fair in August 2012.
