For over 50 years, Mike Parr’s work has confronted the contradictions of human behaviour and the politics of the interpersonal. Beyond the shock of his performances and the intense displacements of his films, printmaking, drawing, sculpture lies a deeper examination of both the limits of self-portraiture and the defining boundaries of authentic personal and political expression. Through key performances such as Jackson Pollock the Female (2016), and seminal bodies of work including Rules and Displacement Activities (1973 -1983), and The Self-Portrait Project (1981 – 2025), Parr challenges conventional attitudes towards difference and uncompromisingly confronts his own limitations along with those of his audience. 

Underneath the Bitumen the Artist, performed for Darkmofo June 2018, took the artist to new limits of mental and physical endurance. For 3 days and 3 nights, he was buried alive beneath one of Hobart’s main roads, and for 3 days and 3 nights audiences assembled in rain and cold to stare at nothing. It was this performance that led the artist to the blind painting performances which have become his core preoccupation ever since. “I became an artist”, he writes, “in order to transcend myself but my final performances transcend art”.  A body of work then, that consistently challenges audiences to consider mental states and political positions that many of us would prefer to avoid. 

Parr, as a consequence, sees himself as a realist. His work in many mediums constitutes an eternal return to the fundamentals of identity, consciousness and memory. Self-criticism, reception theory, irony, and incurability are sardonic, shape-shifting attitudes for all his work.

In 2023, Mike Parr presented a solo exhibition The Intimate Resistance: Mike Parr’s Performance Work 1971-2023 at the Bogota Museum of Modern Art, Colombia and at the Fondazione Morra Naples, Italy. In 2016, he showcased a major survey, Foreign Looking, at the National Gallery of Australia, and in 2012 he presented a survey, Edelweiss, at the Kunsthalle Wien, Austria. He represented Australia at the 1980 Venice Biennale and presented at eight editions of the Biennale of Sydney. Parr’s work is held in numerous public collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Gifu Museum, Japan; MUMOK, Vienna; Marina Abramovic Institute; National Gallery of Australia; Art Gallery of New South Wales; National Gallery of Victoria and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney.

View Artist CV (.pdf)