18 February – 28 June
Ballroom and Entrance Foyer

Within The Tides presents works by Jeffrey Harris covering a thirty-year period from 1974 to 2003. This exhibition highlights some key moments from a long career of one of New Zealand’s preeminent artists, which is still ongoing. 

Identifying as a South Islander, Jeffrey Harris (b.1949) was raised on a dairy farm in Akaroa, Banks Peninsula. He made Dunedin his home in 1970 and lives there now but also spent 14 years in Melbourne. The natural environment has often been influential. Traces of the Banks Peninsula and Dunedin/Otago appear in many of his paintings.

Lived experience is a thread running through Harris’s work. Family members and moments in time feature as markers. Several paintings in the collection present another part of his practice, the use of media as source material. One small painting Mai Lai: Face from The Crowd (1981, Collection) is based on the famous photograph of the Mai Lai massacre in Vietnam in 1968.

Harris’s work is renowned for a ‘style’ realised during the first few decades of his career. There is a notable use of bold colour and mark-making in an Expressionist mode. The human figure is a common feature, often conceived in linear form. In the mid-1980s Harris took up a residency at the Victorian School of Art and relocated to Melbourne. The major five panel painting Within the Tides (1986, Collection), six metres in length, was created during this period and can be seen as a transition work, marking a change in direction, the broad brushwork showing a concern with paint medium. Harris came to produce monochromatic abstract paintings during his time in Australia, these works forming a departure from the figure and bold colour altogether.

Harris was the recipient of the Paramount Award in the 12th Annual Wallace Arts Awards in 2003 (it is now in its 29th year). The winning painting titled From Dream #2838 (2003, Collection) is from the period following his return to New Zealand in 2000. This large work, two metres in height, is part of a unique series of paintings collectively titled From Dream. Distinctive in this body of work are cadmium red or orange backgrounds. Floating over these grounds are skull-like heads with tentacles.

Jeffrey Harris, Within The Tides, 1986, Oils on linen, 5 panels.

Jeffrey Harris, From Dream # 2838, 2003, Oil on linen.

Jeffrey Harris, The Prisoner of Love, 1982, Oil on linen.