Alfred Harris – The Artist (written by Lizzie Pink)
2012
Welcome to Alfred Harris’s Website.
Here are a few thoughts about his practice that may help you navigate through the work and ponder some wider questions about art and life along the way.
Here are a few thoughts about his practice that may help you navigate through the work and ponder some wider questions about art and life along the way.
1997
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Alfred Harris is a difficult artist to place historically as he belongs to no specific school or stylistic fashion in post-War art. However it is this fierce independence and his continuing commitment to the practice of painting as a vital, responsive process which marks his currency and his continuing relevance as an artist.
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2005
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1997
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His ‘expressive’ series of self-portrait studies testify to his affinity and overlap with acclaimed school of London painters such as Leon Kossoff, Frank Auerbach and Lucien Freud. Their philosophy of art, characterised as part of a Jewish Expressionist tradition, demanded painting must be done directly and unflinchingly in response to the subject and in the process of painting release profound emotional and psychological experiences. This type of expressionist practice is founded on a search for the visual means to discover then sublimate or re-present some of the most profound, mysterious yet everyday experiences of human beings in their heroic yet tragic struggle of existence. This type of ‘existential’ commitment to painting in the studio was articulated and historicised through a Tate exhibition in the Eighties titled, ‘The Hard-won Image’.
2010
2010
His continuing relevance is marked by the current shift and new groundswell of activity in the art-world towards more open-ended and performative work. Tate Modern’s recent rehang and performance based work in the Tanks signals this tendency towards the live and process-based. Mikhail Bahktin’s theory of the carnivalesque which he used to engage with the writings of Rabelais is now used regularly to open up a more dynamic model of art making and audience reception. Artists interested in expressive modes of work are no longer ridiculed or deemed impotent in the face of technological mediation. More people are seeking the live and textured quality of hand-made expressive and performative practices. There seems to be an interest in art that is urgent to speak and not bound to forms of appropriation and mediation.
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2012
The paradox of this raw, anti-illusionistic, free-flowing, Expressionist approach to painting is that it is frequently based on the most arduous and extensive artistic training and drawing from life. Artists such as David Bomberg, Leon Kossoff, Frank Auerbach and Alfred Harris all developed a daily practice of drawing. The kinetic flows and bodily responses of their gestural brushwork in painting is based on the discipline of draughtsmanship and it is drawing that underpins all of their most free-flowing and gestural wet-in-wet paintings.
This Jewish Expressionist heritage of painting is driven by an urgency to communicate some of the most uncomfortable and unspeakable aspects of our mortal lives. Painting for these artists must never fall back into seductive or decorative modes or slip into representing human beings through visual clichés. Alfred Harris is not making work to decorate apartments but paints as part of a philosophical and metaphysical quest to understand some of the most profound aspects of his human experience and place in the world. 
2003
1977
1977
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