Footnotes

PROVENANCE
Tolarno Galleries, Melbourne
Private collection, Brisbane, acquired from the above in 2004
Private collection, New South Wales
Shapiro, Sydney, 27 August 2018, lot 31
Private collection, Melbourne

EXHIBITED
Brent Harris: The Face, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 22 April - 13 June 2004, cat. 3
Just a Feeling: Brent Harris, Selected Works 1987-2005, The Ian Potter Museum of Art, The University of Melbourne, Melbourne, 11 February - 7 May 2006, cat. 26

LITERATURE
Steven Miller, Brent Harris: The Face, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 2004, n.p.
Just a Feeling: Brent Harris, Selected Works 1987-2005, The Ian Potter Museum of Art, The University of Melbourne, 2006, pp. 17, 33


'At first glance there seems to be a paradox at the heart of Brent Harris's paintings: while they deal with extreme states of emotion—the anguish of Christ's passion, the forces of desire, intimidation, transcendence, sorrow and fear—these are so intensely distilled in the process of painting that by the end they are almost hidden behind a veneer of finely tuned and immaculately rendered forms. Almost, but not quite, for this process of distillation is one which, in the end, only serves to heighten the paintings' emotional power. Such power is intensified further by a certain ambiguity between horror and absurdity that can leave the viewer wondering whether to laugh or cry...

Over the last couple of years Harris has returned to Christian iconography, for, in his words, 'there are few more powerful narratives for dealing with love and pain, with a world of ragged edges, or transience and death'. The faces of Christ and Mary (among other religious icons) have been of particular interest, and in He washed away my sins, 2004, and Mary, 2005, Harris deploys the greatest economy of means to synthesise the features of two of the most frequently painted faces in the Western tradition. But these works are arguably more distinctive for what they leave out rather than what they include, and as usual nothing is quite what it seems: as in René Magritte's famous painting The rape (1934, the Menil Collection, Houston, Texas), Christ's eyes double as breasts and his lips, female pudenda.'1

1. Sarah Thomas, 'The Passion of Brent Harris', Just a Feeling: Brent Harris, Selected Works 1987-2005, exh. cat., The Ian Potter Museum of Art, The University of Melbourne, Melbourne, 2006, pp. 10-12