Mike Parr

  • Mike Parr stands as one of Australia’s most significant and uncompromising artists. Since his first solo exhibition in 1970, he has forged an extraordinary practice spanning performance, printmaking, painting, sculpture and installation. His work is confronting, intensely personal and often physically demanding, challenging the boundaries of language, identity and the human body.

     

    Parr’s relentless engagement with the self-portrait is less concerned with likeness than with what lies beneath it: the unstable, fragmented and often unknowable self. In Punctum & Friend [G & M] (2008), drypoint is used to physically excavate the copper plate, the needle cutting into its surface to raise a burr that holds the black ink. The resulting line is forced into existence; it carries the pressure and resistance of the artist’s hand. The image is repeatedly drawn, copied, redrawn, etched, degraded and displaced until the original likeness begins to disappear. What remains is something more elemental – the trace of a person rather than their representation. Parr has described this process in terms of excavation, as though the image were already embedded within the material, ready to be unearthed through repeated trauma to the surface. The final result carries the evidence of everything that has come before.

     

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