Jeffrey Harris, Dunedin Public Art Gallery

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

Two Chartwell works were included in this exhibition.

Jeffrey Harris, '28' Diptych, 1987, oil, acrylic and fake fur on canvas

Jeffrey Harris
'28' Diptych
1987, oil, acrylic and fake fur on canvas.

Jeffrey Harris, Chance, 1985, oil on canvas

Jeffrey Harris
Chance
1985, oil on canvas

Exhibition report by Tim Pollock, DPAG.

Strange, beautiful, intense - the art of Jeffrey Harris is a high-pressure zone. This survey exhibition offers a unique journey through it.

This exhibition is the first chance audiences have had to experience Harris's painted worlds in depth. Reaching from razor-sharp etchings to jewel-like 'icons', from vast, sumptuous triptyches to a group of unflinching recent self-portraits, the show highlights major themes and key episodes from Harris's thirty-five years of art-making.

Lost loves, charged encounters and moments of high emotion are among the best-known subjects of this Dunedin-based painter. Since his last survey exhibition at the Dunedin Public Art Gallery in 1981, however, Harris has pushed toward new thresholds of scale, colour and graphic force.

Among the highlights of the exhibition are a group of paintings from Harris's renowned and rarely-seen 'Icon' series, several groups of prints made in collaboration with Australian master printer John Loane, and several of the large, blazingly coloured multi-panel paintings that Harris made in the mid-1980s.

Bringing the prints and paintings of his Australian years (the 1990s) into focus for the first time, this exhibition is also the first showing of the recent Wallace Award-winning series called From Dream. What unites all of the works is Harris's faith in painting as, in his words, 'a condensation of experience and intensity'.

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. 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.

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