Volte Face

Mike Parr Prints & Pre-Prints 1970 - 2005

2 March - 21 May 2006

Mike Parr’s solo exhibition forms part of a wider season of exhibitions at the MCA exploring self-portraiture by selected Australian and international artists. This exhibition focuses on Parr’s works on paper from the 1990s to the present, as well as early contextual pieces of the 1970s. It includes a selection of key print works drawn from the artist’s studio as well as institutional and private loans, the MCA collection work Black Box of word situations, variation #3, and the artist’s Black Box of 100 Self Portrait Etchings, comprising 100 boxed portrait prints with individually hand-treated surfaces. Also featured is the artist’s performative video 100 Breaths, featuring Parr ‘inhaling’ the individual prints, one by one, to his face in the form of temporary masks.

This exhibition explores the artist’s ongoing self portrait project, sustained through the print medium for two decades, and proposes that self portraiture is an ambivalent, inherently unstable project, like identity itself. It depicts the self through distortional processes including anamorphism, mirroring and reversal, and literal physical disjuncture between body and head/mind. In these works repetition and reinvention are central, and a range of mark-making techniques are employed.

Mike Parr is well known for his work across diverse media including performance, photography, sculpture, video, drawing and printmaking. Active as an artist in Australia since the late 1960s, with an extensive exhibitions history both locally and internationally, he has examined a range of philosophical and political concerns that embrace both the self and the wider world over time.

ADMISSION: FREE

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