Artwork Information

Despite being born in Palmerston North, Brent Harris has spent most of his adult life living and working in Australia. One of the dominant themes across Harris’s work is complex familial relationships, a reflection of his own family dynamic. Following his father’s death in 2016, Brent Harris felt able to re-engage with Aotearoa New Zealand. Re-connecting with the country after an absence of more than 20 years, he began a new cycle of paintings featuring personal iconography, biographical references and geographical features of the landscapes of his youth.

As a child Harris could see the snow-capped peaks of Taranaki and Ruapehu from the roof of his family home. The two mountains inspired the Peaks series of paintings. The painting also references the paintings of Petrus van der Velden (1837–1913), which Harris remembers first seeing as a child. Peaks (to the river), 2019 marks this period of Harris’s conscious re-engagement with Aotearoa.