CANBERRA.- Mike Parr is one of Australia’s most influential artists and the subject of a challenging exhibition on view at the National Gallery of Australia. Mike Parr: Foreign Looking is the first exhibition to bring together works in all media from Parr’s unrelentingly experimental practice from 1970 to the present.

Parr complicates Pollock’s status as a macho art historical figure in a provocative new performance titled Jackson Pollock the Female. Jackson Pollock’s Blue Poles holds great significance for the artist. Acquired by the National Gallery in 1973 as he was emerging as an artist, Parr viewed action painter Pollock as the father of performance art. He also saw the acquisition of the painting as a mark of cultural maturity: a highpoint at which Australia was willing to invest in the arts. The famous painting is being exhibited in the performance space.

Mike Parr first came to prominence in the early 1970s co-establishing Australia’s first artist-run space Inhibodress in Woolloomooloo, Sydney. Parr’s seminal performance work is internationally recognised. He represented Australia at the Venice Biennale in 1980 and in 2012 the Kunsthalle Wien in Vienna hosted a major survey of his work. His work is always challenging and is motivated by psychoanalytic, philosophical, literary and political interests.

‘Mike Parr is without doubt Australia’s most renowned and influential performance artist,’ said Roger Butler, NGA Senior Curator of Australian Prints, Drawings & Illustrated Books. ‘His disruptive and often political work has been the subject of debate for over four decades and we are thrilled to have so much of his artistic journey represented in this exhibition.’

Spanning nine galleries this installation of performance, film, sculpture, drawing, printmaking and photography provokes a challenging yet mesmerising experience. The exhibition presents works never previously seen including the suite of distorted portrait photographs Self Portraits through Mother’s Glassware (1982). It also features a theatrette program devoted to Parr’s work as an avant-garde filmmaker, showing his extraordinary trilogy Rules and Displacement Activities (1973 – 83).

A large and active Information Centre also occupies a space inside the exhibition, allowing visitors to delve into the artist’s vast archive and meet writers, artists and performance artists as part of a revolving program of public events and activities inspired by Parr’s works. Mike Parr will also undertake a number of performances in the space including Reading for the End of Time, a durational piece based on Roland Barthes’ Camera Lucida.