Mike Parr

Foreign Looking

Exhibition
12 Aug – 6 Nov 2016
Close-up photography of a man with sections of his face painted in bright colours

Mike Parr (artist), Paul Green (photographer), The Sickness Unto Death, (detail) Sydney, 2015. Image courtesy of the artist

About

Mike Parr is one of Australia's pre-eminent artists with a practice spanning performance, film, painting, sculpture and printmaking. Emerging from a background of conceptual art in the early 1970s, his interrogatory poems and word works escalated into the provocative performance art for which he is now recognised internationally.

Accumulating under the banner of the Self Portrait Project, Parr's vast body of work uses art and language to crack surfaces and explode character. Delving into memory and the unconscious, his art plays out in a richly associative field in which material gestures are psychologically charged. Resisting a conventional chronology, Mike Parr: Foreign Looking reveals the dense and delicate connections evident in Parr's continually experimental practice.

This is the first exhibition to bring together Parr's work in all media from 1970 to the present. A series of projection rooms and theatrette focus on Parr's performance artist and filmmaking practice, while a dedicated reading room and performance space hosts talks, workshops and new performance commissions until 6 November 2016.

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