• The Female Body Concealed and Revealed with Minimal Marks

    Philip Hartigan
    Hyperallergic
    The Female Body Concealed and Revealed with Minimal Marks
    Review of the exhibition Anne Harris: Coddled and Bruised
    hyperallergic.com/257826/the-female-bod…

  • On Finishing: Anne Harris

    MW Capacity
    On Finishing: Anne Harris
    Christopher Lowrance and Mathew Lopas pose the question, "Are you a good closer?"
    mwcapacity.wordpress.com/2015/10/02/on-…

  • Anne Harris: The Eyelid as Metaphor

    Tilted Arc
    The Eyelid as Metaphor
    Discussing metaphor in painting, by Anne Harris
    www.tilted-arc.com/2015/04/02/anne-harr…

  • The WIP Project: What Is Painting? Featuring Anne Harris

    NEOTERIC ART
    The WIP Project: What is Painting?
    Anne Harris writes for the WIP project. Artists are asked to answer the question, "What is Painting?"
    neotericart.com/2014/09/19/the-wip-proj…

  • Our Calamity is Our Providence

    BAD AT SPORTS
    Our Calamity is Our Providence, By Kevin Blake
    Essay discussing the role of anxiety in the making of art. Artists discussed include William Powhida, Michelle Grabner, De Sokolow, Anne Harris and Tony Cokes.
    badatsports.com/2014/our-calamity-is-ou…

  • Anne Harris: Notes on Dana DeGiulio

    Notes on Dana DeGiulio
    Not Or, But And: Figurative vs. Abstract
    Hyde Park Art Center
    Artists are invited by curator Melody Saraniti to invite another artist to hang next to them as their counterpoint. The first artist is asked also to write about their choice. Anne Harris chooses and writes about painter Dana DeGiulio.
    anneharrispainting.com/artwork/3619205_…
    melodysaraniti.tumblr.com/

  • Anne Harris on Matthew Girson: Seeing Slowly in Dark Light

    BAD AT SPORTS
    Essay/review by Anne Harris on Matthew Girson's The Painter's Other Library at the Chicago Cultural Center
    badatsports.com/2014/matthew-girson-see…

  • Anne Harris on Dieric Bouts: Feeling Painting and Painting Feeling

  • The Portable Universe, catalogy essay by Anne Harris

    The Portable Universe by Anne Harris, essay for the catalog published on the occasion of Ornament, curated by an Anne Harris, an exhibition of artwork by Sabina Ott at the Riverside Art Center, Riverside, IL, November 23, 2013 - January 12, 2014
    sabinaott.com/artwork/3420267_The_Porta…

  • A Conversation With Anne Harris

    Figure/Ground Communication
    figureground.org/a-conversation-with-an…

  • Lawrence Gipe and John Seed, "Art LTD"

    Depiction and the Picture: Dialogue on Contemporary Representational Art
    www.artltdmag.com/index.php?subaction=s…

  • William Eckhardt Kohler, "Huffington Post"

    Anne Harris at Alexandre: Painting the Self
    www.huffingtonpost.com/william-eckhardt…

  • BLOUIN ARTINFO video

    The "Phantasmatical: Self Portriats" of Anne Harris
    Interview/editing by Dion Tan; camera by Dion Tan and Kristen Boatright
    www.blouinartinfo.com/news/story/896095…

  • Portrait of an Artist: Anne Harris

    Smithsonian, National Portrait Gallery: Face to Face
    face2face.si.edu/my_weblog/2013/02/port…

  • Allison Malafronte, "Fine Art Connoisseur"

    Anne Harris: A Hard Honest Look at Aging
    www.fineartconnoisseur.com/pages/160187…

  • John Seed, "Huffington Post"

    Phantasmatical: Self Portraits,
    www.huffingtonpost.com/john-seed/anne-h…

  • Carl Belz, "Left Bank Art Blog," May 17, 2012

    Wherefore the Figure, Wherefore the Self
    leftbankartblog.blogspot.com/2012/05/wh…





  • John Seed, *Huffington Post,* 4/17/11

    Anne Harris: "They start with me..."
    www.huffingtonpost.com/john-seed/anne-h…


  • Jonathan Goodman, *Art in America,* 2008

    Anne Harris--New Work, Alexandre Gallery, New York

    Anne Harris's portraits go back at least 20 years, to paintings she made of herself and others in graduate school. Attracted to both hazy atmospheres and searing honesty, she has pursued an ambitious program. Accomplished technique supports the often brutal frankness of her self-portraits, which have the gravitas that results when truth is favored over any easy kind of beauty.

    The nine paintings in the show, on canvas, paper and Mylar, represent the artist as a middle-aged woman whose body has been softened by time. In Self-Portrait (Orange), 2006-07, an oil and mixed-medium work on Mylar, we see a full-figured nude, painted in orange with white and gray highlights, set against an orange ground. It is clear from this painting and the others shown that while Harris is fascinated with physical vulnerability, and portrays the curves and recesses of the flesh with skill, she is also intent on capturing her own guarded stance vis-a-vis the viewer. Here her face is grim with unspoken trouble, and we are left wondering what it is that engages her.

    In Angel (2007), an oil painting on linen, Harris's hair streams out behind her, forming a reddish-brown nimbus around her head. Her body is rendered in flesh tones, with the black hair of her pubis and the veins in her legs standing out. Her hands are wide open, and there is a resigned look on her face; a half smile, bordering on a grimace, allows no certainty about her emotional state. A reddish aura surrounds the body, casting it in a subtle glow but offering little solace.

    The same facial expression can be found in Portrait (Second Angel), 2007, another oil painting whose subject is mysteriously grim. One finds something troubling about each of the works, and it is this unease that marks Harris not only as a painter of unusual formal skill, but also an artist who continues to search for uncomfortable truths.


  • Review: Suzanne Szucs

  • Art on Paper, 2006

    March / April 06
    prints
    drawings
    photography
    books
    ephemera
    March / April 06
    prints
    drawings
    photography
    books
    ephemera
    Boston

    Anne Harris at Nielsen Gallery

    Known for her Old-Master deftness,
    Harris uses her brush-handling skills to
    make unflattering, and unflinchingly psychological,
    self-portraits. In a previous
    series, for example, she depicted her pregnant,
    nude self, bug-eyed, grotesque and
    swollen—a reflection, surely, more of how
    she felt than how she looked.

    In this show of mostly small, 12-inchsquare
    drawings—made with ballpoint
    pen, watercolor, colored pencil, and
    graphite, on either paper or vellum—she
    presented life-size faces of unidentified
    subjects, male and female. Nearly all are
    titled “How to Draw Yourself Out of a
    Hole,” which pretty much explains things.

    Sixty-six of them, some more fully
    realized than others, covered one wall. In
    the most fugitive images, fragments of
    faces, often half-lidded and demonic-looking,
    seem to be floating to the surface of
    the paper. In others, the dark and acid
    tones used to contour and shade call to
    mind Alberto Giacometti's haunting portraits.


    The exhibition also included a small
    series of larger drawings, dated
    1998/2005, that depict female torsos—
    primarily shoulders and chests—rendered

    Anne Harris, How to Draw Yourself Out of a Hole
    #52, oil, watercolor, and graphite on mylar laid
    on Rives BFK (12 x 11 in.), 2005. Courtesy Nielsen
    Gallery


    in a silvery light. In the most evocative of
    these, an untitled work in pastel and
    graphite on three sheets of conjoined gray
    Rives paper, the composition shifts one’s
    eyes away from the shimmering breasts up
    to the face, where they meet nothing but
    the faintest pinpoint pupils. Whether rising
    or sinking, this disembodied figure
    embodies, perhaps, the dilemma behind
    Harris’s exercise in exorcism. Will it be
    head or heart, concept or intuition, that
    perseveres?

    —Ann Wilson Lloyd



  • Jonathan Goodman, *Art in America," Feb., 2003

    "Anne Harris and Cyntia Knott at DC Moore- New York"

    Anne Harris disturbs as much as she charms. A figurative painter of considerable skill, she has concentrated in the past five years on self-portraits and pictures of her young son, Max; the compositions glow with transcendent light, but her harsh documentation of the human form also arouses repulsion. In one portrait of herself from 1996-97, she stands naked and pregnant, her eyes half closed and her mouth slightly open. Her expression is uncanny, nearly threatening. She almost seems to have come from the dead. The unmistakable discomfort we feel on seeing this image comes from Harris's remarkable detail. In her paintings she can seem witchlike, devoted to dark causes, even as she compels admiration for her translucent flesh and riveting gaze.

    In her exhibition of recent work, she presented portraits of her son as well as people painted entirely from the imagination; the same principle of highly realized particulars and general sense of unease obtained. In the small (12-by-12-inch) Portrait (Little Girl/Pink Dress), 2002, Harris's gothic vision is triumphant. A small girl with wavy golden hair and downcast eyes does not convey the innocence that the title suggests. The atmosphere is decidedly creepy. The figure's open mouth, visible teeth, lowered gaze, pug nose and high forehead deliver the impression of menace; everything seems wrong. In Blond Max (2001), another small work, Harris depicts her son in profile. He gazes unseeingly off to the right, his huge head causing the suspicion that something is terribly out of kilter, even though the boy is suffused in a lovely yellow-gold light. In Old Neck Portrait (2001), a woman's wiry hair frames her face. Like the other subjects, she looks downward, her eyes just barely in tandem. Harris paints otherworldly themes in the guise of simple representation.

  • New York Times: Ken Johnson 2002

    The New York Times, May 24, 2002, Ken Johnson)

    *ANNE HARRIS, DC Moore, 724 Fifth Avenue, (212) 247-2111 (through June 14). Using herself and her children as models and employing a deft combination of modernist and old masterly skills, Ms. Harris paints luminous, delightfully weird portraits of possibly demonic or maybe angelic beings. They have finely detailed, glowing eyes; thin, veined skin; and overripe lips. They seem to emerge from a hallucinatory haze (Johnson).

  • Art in America, 1998