Brent Harris: Surrender & Catch, the first major monograph of the Aotearoa-born, Melbourne-based artist Brent Harris opens at AGSA.

Curated by Maria Zagala and co-presented with Tarra Warra Museum of Art, brings together over 100 paintings, drawings, studies and prints, traversing the artist’s practice and stylistic shifts over his career.

Brent Harris: Surrender & Catch maps the ways Harris’s art has developed over the past four decades, featuring a broad selection of works from 1987 to 2022. Harris’s distinctive style, which moves between figuration and abstraction, deploys both humour and the grotesque to examine psychological subject matter as he visualises his complex and contradictory feelings. Indeed, the exhibition title refers to Harris’s interest in sociologist Kurt H. Wolff’s notion of ‘surrender and catch’ as a process for self-analysis and as a method of working.

Exhibition dates: 6 July – 20 October 2024.

 In this segment, we hear from Maria Zagala, who has worked as Associate Curator of Prints, Drawings & Photographs at the Art Gallery of South Australia since 2006. From 1996 to 2006 she was Assistant Curator of Prints & Drawings at the National Gallery of Victoria. Maria completed her Master of Fine Arts at La Trobe University specializing in life drawing practice in the Italian Renaissance, with extended periods of research in Berlin, London and Florence. Brent Harris, who has been actively exhibiting since the mid-1980s. He is a painter and printmaker who has lived in Melbourne for over forty years. Harris’s works are known for their flat space, clean lines and graphic forms, which belie the underlying themes of his work, such as mortality, trauma, eroticism and childhood.