Lot 37

Anna Schwartz Gallery, Melbourne 2002
Private collection, Melbourne

© Mike Parr. Courtesy the artist and Anna Schwartz Gallery.

After his first solo exhibition in 1970, Mike Parr became a pioneer in the development of contemporary art in Australia. His work is often highly political, intellectual and large scale with its own unique visual language. His practice ranges across performance art, installation, printmaking, and drawing.

Parr originally considered a career as a poet with words and language having always been significant to him, instilled in him in childhood through his father. Although he eventually chose to pursue a career as an artist, poetry has consistently informed his artistic practice. Bodily trauma is another significant influence for Parr. His left arm is congenitally malformed, which he addresses regularly in his art. Mike attempts to challenge representations of the body, and even involves his own body regularly in his art practice.

By the 1980s, Parr was experimenting with printmaking. As a largely self-taught artist, Parr had the freedom to experiment with whatever techniques he was naturally drawn to - in many cases several at once. Whilst experimenting with print techniques, Parr began to incorporate his body into the process to disfigure the paper and interfere with the pigment to the paper's surface.

Never one to shy away from challenging conversation, Parr's political and social views form an integral part of his artwork as well as his lectures, writings and public comments. Whilst perhaps not his sole aim, his works do enlighten their audience.

"My work has never been intentionally educational, it doesn't work like that. I'm preoccupied by the incoherence of the ground of art because I see this as a necessary state…I also see this incoherence as a form…a state of material exuberance, power and difference." 1.

In 2016, the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra facilitated the museum's largest survey of a contemporary Australian artist, Foreign Looking by Mike Parr.

Olivia Fuller
Head of Art

1. Crawford, A., Mike Parr | Foreign Looking, Artist Profile, 2016, https://www.artistprofile.com.au/mike-parr/