Brent Harris: Surrender & Catch

Brent Harris: Surrender & Catch seeks to map the ways in which Harris’s art has developed over the past four decades. It presents an overview of Harris’s career, and through a number of in-depth essays explores critical aspects of Harris’s complex and layered work. The contributors employ a range of interpretive modes and formats to apprehend Harris’s art: from analysis of one work, methodology or theme, to interview. These approaches provide new insights into Harris’s practice and contribute to the growing literature on the artist.

The essays include Maria Zagala’s overview of Harris’s development; Anthony Fitzpatrick’s in-depth reading of a key work – I Weep My Mother’s Breasts from 1996; Cathy Leahy’s interview with Harris’s long-term printer John Loane of Viridian Press; Dr Helen Hughes’s exploration of the motivating impulse behind Harris’s citation of artistic sources; and Dr Laurence Simmons psychoanalytic reading of Harris’s iconography, in particular the rich theme of the monstrous. The book reprints two important essays – one by James Mollison on Harris’s early series Bubbles, Just a Feeling and Sleep, 2004, and the other by the artist on the personal significance of Colin McCahon’s painting The Family, 1947. An illustrated chronology by Tim Riley Walsh offers a detailed timeline of the artist’s life. These essays will provide a rich context through which to view the comprehensive illustrations, featured in the book.

Launches 2 December 2023

Author: Maria Zagala with essays by

Anthony Fitzpatrick (Curator at TarraWarra Museum of Art); Dr Helen Hughes (Deputy Head, Department of Fine Art, and Senior Lecturer, Art History & Theory, Curatorial Practice at Monash University); Cathy Leahy (Senior Curator of Prints & Drawings, National Gallery of Victoria); James Mollison, AO (1931–2020), founding Director, National Gallery of Australia (1971–89) and Director, National Gallery of Victoria (1989–95); Dr Laurence Simmons, Professor of Film Studies at the University of Auckland; Tim Riley Walsh is Assistant Curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney

hardback with linen cloth cover

200 pages, 280 x 220 mm

300+ full-colour illustrations, including illustrated checklist