Jeffrey Harris

This is the first showing of a major new acquisition for the Dunedin Public Art Gallery. Made by an artist famed for his pencil drawings, this 32-part series is a visual story of love and separation, and a whirlwind of graphic invention. It is also a – perhaps the – key bridge between the figurative work Jeffrey Harris made while living in Dunedin in the 1970s and early 1980s, and the stark, increasingly abstract paintings he made throughout the 1990s while living in Australia.

In 1999, Harris returned to Dunedin, and in 2004 a survey of his work opened at the Dunedin Public Art Gallery, connecting what went before with what came after. This proved to be a perfect occasion to expand the Gallery’s holdings of Harris’s work, which until recently did not extend past the early 1980s. Since 2003, two recent paintings by Harris have entered the collection, as has a set of eight aquatints, a gift of the artist. All of these works appear in the touring survey Jeffrey Harris, which shows at Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetu from 24 March until 25 June. 

*

The drawings were made in 1986, the year of Harris’s shift from Dunedin to Melbourne to take part in a residency at the Victorian College of Arts in Melbourne, and shown soon after at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art. The second and last time they were exhibited was at Ray Hughes Gallery in Sydney later the same year.

Read from left to right, the series describes an emotional unravelling. It begins with studies of figures embroiled in dramas of love and separation, drawn in the extraordinarily fine and tense style for which Harris was well known before departing New Zealand. Few artists have woven more emotional intensity on to a single page. But as the series opens out, so does its graphic style, becoming increasingly flourishing, physical and urgent. By the time we reach the final scene, all that remains is a scrawled-in horizon – a band of black and a frame of white that is a foreflash of the abstract, black-and-white work that Harris would begin to paint in volume in the 1990s.

Drawings are frequently accorded less prominence and value than paintings, but The Melbourne Drawings demonstrate that, when considering Harris, traditional hierarchies of media are irrelevant. The series surrenders nothing in scope or intensity to Harris’s paintings then or since.