Brent Harris

Brent Harris
born New Zealand 1956; arrived Australia 1981

Larry Rawling (printer)
Mark Grant (publisher)

Swamp No. 8 2001
colour screenprint; edition 27/30
Geelong Gallery
Gift of Mark Grant through the Australian Government's Cultural Gifts Program, 2017

Brent Harris’ Swamp works express the duality of opposing forces with a refined simplicity: positive and negative, absence and presence and figure and ground are conjured from a single undulating line that divides a monochromatic palette.

These works’ distillation of form emerges from a series of preparatory drawings that are made in the lead-up to the finished work: a technique that Harris applies to both his printmaking and painting practices at large. Through this drafting process, pictorial flatness and crisp spatial distinctions emerge as deceptively expressive and organic elements, with finished works projecting the artist’s evocation of intense, yet restrained, emotional states.