Look closely at what you’d rather not see

For more than five decades, Mike Parr has refused to let audiences look away. The Sydney-based artist, now approaching his 80th year, continues to push the boundaries of performance, printmaking, and drawing with an uncompromising vision that has earned him recognition as one of Australia’s most significant contemporary artists. His forthcoming exhibition at Syrup Contemporary, in the inner-city Sydney suburb of Marrickville, promises to be one of his most personally revealing projects to date.

Since his first solo exhibition in 1970, Parr has developed a visual language of resistance that has resonated far beyond Australia’s shores. From his early participation in the Venice Biennale in 1980 to his 2015 presentation The Ghost Who Talks at the 56th Venice Biennale, his work has consistently challenged international audiences while maintaining its roots in Australian political and social realities.

Parr’s practice emerges from a unique intersection of poetry, performance, and politics, underpinned by intellectual rigor that traces back to his rural Queensland upbringing and his father’s gift of a dictionary in 1968, which he continues to reference today. Self-taught and unbound by convention, he has consistently used his own body—born with a congenitally malformed left arm—as both subject and tool, transforming personal trauma into broader social commentary.

His durational performances have become increasingly ambitious and punishing. The 72-hour Asleep in the Tree performance at the 2022 Sydney Biennale was preceded by equally demanding works like Entry by Mirror Only (2016), a 72-hour continuous performance at the former Willow Court Female Maximum Security Ward for the Criminally Insane in Tasmania. These extreme endurance pieces reflect Parr’s understanding of performance as a means of embodying social and political critique, creating visceral confrontations with discomfort that mirror society’s tendency to look away from difficult truths.

The first stage of the Syrup Contemporary exhibition, “Turning a Blind Eye,” represents a natural evolution of these concerns. The evening will feature a three-hour blind painting performance, during which the artist will create black squares without sight—a radical act of faith in the physical process of mark-making that strips away the visual feedback loop typically central to painting.

This performance builds on decades of work exploring the relationship between seeing and knowing. From his early Word Situations series (1971) through his ongoing Self Portrait Project, Parr has consistently questioned the reliability of vision as a means of understanding either the self or the world. The blind painting performance represents both a literal and metaphorical exploration of sight and insight, connecting to his broader investigation of how society systematically “turns a blind eye” to uncomfortable realities.

The performance component will remain as an installation for the first half of the exhibition, with video documentation playing on two large screens, ensuring that the temporal act continues to reverberate through the gallery space long after its completion.

The exhibition’s second stage, Human Animals, delves into profoundly personal territory. This phase will present 30 drawings and 24 new etchings that investigate the artist’s struggle with the memory of his brother Tim (now deceased), grappling with presence and absence in image making practices as well as memory. The decision to maintain the random black patches from the first stage’s performance creates what the artist describes as “a dialogue to iteration one and its remaining meaning.” This palimpsestic approach speaks to Parr’s understanding of memory itself as layered, fragmentary, and never fully erasable.

The 24 new etchings continue Parr’s experimental approach to printmaking, which he began exploring in the late 1980s without formal training. His technique, characterised using his body to abrade and disfigure paper surfaces, connects to his broader understanding of art-making as a fundamentally embodied practice.

While Human Animals focuses on personal loss, the title carries broader implications that connect to Parr’s decades-long engagement with political themes. Throughout his career, he has addressed society’s treatment of those deemed “other”—from his own experience of physical difference to his performances examining responses to asylum seekers like Close the Concentration Camps (2002). The phrase “human animals” evokes questions about who gets to claim full humanity in our society, and under what circumstances that humanity might be denied or diminished. In the context of Parr’s broader practice, this personal meditation on his brother’s death can be read as part of his ongoing investigation into what lives are considered valuable and whose deaths are mourned.

This two-stage exhibition at Syrup Contemporary represents not a summation of his career, but another chapter in an ongoing investigation that began more than 50 years ago. The exhibition’s timing is particularly poignant, coming as Parr approaches his 80th year and continues to grapple with questions of mortality, memory, and legacy. Yet rather than offering retrospective comfort, he presents us with the raw materials of experience: the weight of a brush in a hand that cannot see where it’s going, the persistence of memory in the face of absence, the accumulation of marks and gestures that constitute a life spent making art. In an art world often driven by trends, Parr’s unwavering commitment to difficult subjects and challenging formal approaches offers a different model of artistic practice—one built on endurance, political engagement, and an absolute refusal to compromise. This exhibition continues that trajectory, inviting us once again to look closely at what we’d rather not see.