Jeffrey Harris

JEFFREY HARRIS 
Dunedin Public Art Gallery,
2 October 2003 - 13 February 2005

Among the highlights of the Dunedin exhibition are  several of the large, blazingly coloured multi-panel paintings that Harris made in the mid-1980s while living in Melbourne, Australia.

'28' Diptych, oil, acrylic and fake fur on canvas, 1987
Chartwell Collection, Auckland Art Gallery, Toi o Tamaki.

Having been impressed with contemporary Australian painting, "28" Diptych was seen as an example of the artist responding to the new Australian environment. Curator William McAloon has described it as a transitional work, a passage between Dunedin and Melbourne, between figuration and abstraction. Two figure forms, which relate to his earlier autobiographical fugurative work in New Zealand, remain in one segment of the work but they are almost obliterated beneath a sheet of yellow paint.

The introduction of other materials such as sheepskin, and fabric, show a further move into abstraction. When this work was shown at Home and Away, the 1999 Chartwell Exhibition at the New Gallery, it was partnered with Australian artist Dale Frank's painting Pop goes the weezel, 1989, an acrylic work on printed cotton. Here the grand gestural painting, bright colours, found fabric and physicality of the work explores paintings connection with the everyday.

McAloon also highlighted that Harris was drawn to the work of Tony Tuckson. In the Home and Away catalogue, AAG, 1999, pg 104, he quotes Harris as saying, " Tuckson seemed to be able to make marks and lines without any decorative quality...it was a direct form of painting, the same thing I liked about McCahon in New Zealand."

McAloon pointed out the Tuckson-like grid on the left hand panel of '28' Diptych, the red section with the dark slashes of line dividing the space. Tuckson was a great supporter of Aboriginal art and he was one of the first Australian art museum professionals to establish an Aboriginal art collection ( in his case at the Art Gallery of New South Wales), making several research trips into outback Australia to meet the artists and commission further work.

To see works by Tony Tuckson in the Chartwell Collection, search by artist name and Collection name here.

More notes from DPAG

Jeffrey Harris was born in Akaroa in 1949. A 'self-taught' artist, he has painted full-time since 1970. He came to Dunedin from Christchurch in 1969, encouraged by Michael Smither and Ralph Hotere, and was Frances Hodgkins Fellow at the University of Otago in 1977.

Harris is well-known in New Zealand for his intensely detailed and seemingly angst-ridden works of the 1970s and first half of the 1980s.

Chance, 1985, oil on canvas, details, panels 1-3

A prominent figure in New Zealand art of that time, Harris moved to Australia in the later 1980s and spent a decade there, working through an uncompromising series of black-and-white abstract paintings.

In 2000 Harris departed Australia and returned to Dunedin. In the works he has made since then, figures have returned with a vengeance.
This survey runs at the Dunedin Public Art Gallery from 2 October 2004 until 13 February, 2005, as the Gallery's major contribution to the Otago Arts Festival 2004.

tim.pollock@dcc.govt.nz
http://www.dunedin.art.museum/
www.otago.settlers.museum