City Art is a conservation framing workshop and gallery offering a range of museum-standard picture framing and art care services to artists, art collectors, museums and galleries.

Jeffrey Harris

Self-taught artist Jeffrey Harris is one of the country’s most important expressionist painters. He was the recipient of the Frances Hodgkins Fellowship in 1977 and in 2003 was the paramount winner of the prestigious James Wallace Art Award. His early paintings, pastels and drawings are figurative, largely autobiographical works based in the landscapes of Banks Peninsula, North Otago, Dunedin or Otago Peninsula. In 1986 Harris moved to Melbourne, Australia, where he undertook less personal, more abstract but equally intense works, often stripped of colour to accentuate the act of mark-making itself. Since returning to New Zealand in 2000 Harris’ work has veered back to the figurative, including large, amorphous organic forms flexing in and out of human shape and a series based on eastern European portraits, revealing again his long interest in symbolism. In 2006 the touring exhibition A Unique Journey through the Extraordinary Career of Jeffrey Harris curated by the Dunedin Public Art Gallery celebrated Harris’s 35 years of art-making.

"Isolation, human suffering, sacrifice and the tragic frailty of life are recurrent themes suggested through Harris’s own lexicon of religious symbols which are themselves indebted to the traditions of the early Renaissance masters" – David Eggleton, Art New Zealand, 102.

Gallery:

Peter Adsett
Mark Braunias
Marcus Capes
Peter Carson
Stephen Clarke
Allen Cox
Michael Dell
Andrew Drummond
Guy Frederick
Michael Hamblett
Jeffrey Harris
Roger Hickin
Maree Horner
Kathryn Madill
Michael Reed
Zina Swanson
Philip Trusttum