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Mike Parr, one of Australia’s most rigorous and respected artists will stage The Eternal Opening, an installation exhibiting an actual art gallery as an art object in a gallery at Carriageworks. In a reconstruction of Parr’s minimalist performance, LEFT FIELD [for Robert Hunter] (2017), audiences will enter a life-sized replica of the original space, Anna Schwartz Gallery, Melbourne, to experience both the gallery and the documentation of the original performance as a kind of Eternal Return of the original occurrence.
A series of new performances will accompany the work over the course of its exhibition and as a critical addenda to this program Carriageworks will also present video documentation of Parr’s 2016 work BDH [Burning Down The House] in which hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of the artist’s prints were methodically positioned in the Carriageworks traverser before being doused with petrol and incinerated.
Carriageworks Acting Director Euan Upston said: ‘We are delighted to welcome Mike Parr back to Carriageworks for the presentation of this major new project The Eternal Opening and to present for the first time in Sydney the full-scale documentation of BDH [Burning Down the House], an event which occurred here at Carriageworks in March 2016. Parr is an indomitable and uncompromising artist, whose commitment to interrogating art history and art itself has influenced a generation of practitioners. At Carriageworks, we are committed to presenting work that is ‘artist led’. This project is testament to that commitment.’
Anna Schwartz, Director and Founder of Anna Schwartz Gallery, commented: ‘Having worked with Mike Parr for more than thirty years it seems to me that the replication of The Eternal Opening represents the possible viewing of a lifetime’s practice as a single intensifying work. That it is occurring in Carriageworks has particular resonance given Mike’s history of exhibitions in this space.’
Mike Parr, Left Field [for Robert Hunter], 2017, Image Zan Wimberley.