Felix Harris: Magical Thinking

FELIX HARRIS: MAGICAL THINKING.
11 February–12 March 2022
Wednesday – Friday, 11 am – 5 pm; Saturday 11 am – 1 pm.
MY VACCINE PASS required

Under "code red"– check our website for updated opening hours or email us for an appointment:

radner@rdsgallery.co.nz

The exhibition “Magical Thinking” (11 February–11 March) invites the viewer to explore a set of fifteen vivid and colourful paintings by Dunedin artist Felix Harris produced during the years 2019–2021. According to Gregory O’Brien, 2012 Arts Foundation Te Tumu Toi Laureate, Harris, who draws on a diverse set of references, including “Joan Miró, Denis Diderot, Roland Barthes, William Blake, and the Beats,” mobilises “disjunctive colours, patterns, and pictorial discontinuities” to “impart a sense of strangeness and heightened awareness.” Similarly, Taarn Scott comments that this artist creates a “world” in which “he is the king” - as he “does not let aesthetic determinations, or the privileging of certain voices or hierarchies take control.” Harris offers something akin, deems O’Brien, to “maps whose purpose is to help the map-reader get lost” - enacting the paradox of “Expressionist painting” as a “deluge of life-affirming colour, form and movement while imparting a tragic or violent vision of life.”

Felix Harris (b. 1978, Dunedin, New Zealand) graduated from the Elam School of Fine Arts in 2006, continuing his education with a Bachelor of Art and Design (Honours) from Auckland University of Technology (2014). Felix has travelled extensively overseas and was based in Seattle, Washington 2007-2009. An active visual artist, he has worked as a producer/emcee under the name “fatigue,” with contemporary music continuing to play an important role in his life. Significant influences include Mexican Folk Art and Muralists, as well the work of cartoonist Robert Crumb and the writings of Charles Bukowski.

References
Gregory O’Brien, “Vestibules of a Heavenly Conspection—Paintings by Felix Harris,” in, ed. Alistair Fox and Hilary Radner, FELIX HARRIS: MAGICAL THINKING (Dunedin: RDS Gallery, 2022), 1-4.
Taarn Scott, “The Dreamscapes of Felix Harris,” in, ed. Alistair Fox and Hilary Radner, FELIX HARRIS: MAGICAL THINKING (Dunedin: RDS Gallery, 2022), 5-7.

Images
FELIX HARRIS I'm Yours (2021)
FELIX HARRIS Easy St (2021)
FELIX HARRIS Care of the Soul (2021)