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
Painters on Paintings
paintersonpaintings.com/2014/02/17/anne…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
BostonAnne 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—renderedAnne 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