Mike Parr, Burning of the books, 2003

Inter­ro­gat­ing for­mal and cul­tur­al ortho­dox­ies, the vast and uncom­pro­mis­ing prac­tice of Mike Parr assumes mul­ti­ple forms through a con­fla­tion of draw­ing, print­mak­ing, sculp­ture and per­for­mance. Explor­ing the lim­its of his phys­i­cal and men­tal capac­i­ty, Parr’s high­ly influ­en­tial per­for­mance prac­tice employs his own body as a means to exam­ine iden­ti­ty and polit­i­cal con­ven­tions of the twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry. His decades-long ​‘Self Por­trait Project’ also draws upon his own sub­jec­tiv­i­ty, unfold­ing as a cathar­tic reflec­tion on self­hood and the pro­lif­er­a­tion of perspective.

Through­out his career Parr has con­tin­u­al­ly ques­tioned the pos­si­bil­i­ties and crit­i­cal recep­tion of con­tem­po­rary art. By sub­sum­ing modes of activism into his prac­tice, and work­ing beyond estab­lished struc­tures, Parr rig­or­ous­ly exam­ines aes­thet­ic norms and social cir­cum­stances to reaf­firm his vital role with­in con­tem­po­rary Aus­tralian culture.

Parr rep­re­sent­ed Aus­tralia at the Venice Bien­nale in 1980 and pre­sent­ed the major instal­la­tion The Ghost Who Talks at the Palaz­zo Mora in 2015. In 2016, the Nation­al Gallery of Aus­tralia mount­ed the museum’s largest sur­vey of a con­tem­po­rary Aus­tralian artist, For­eign Look­ing by Mike Parr.