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Dark Cave is the result of veteran Australian artist Mike Parr processing the final stages of trauma he has accumulated across his long-standing performance art practice. The demands of the performances in question date as far back as the eighties, with their lingering effects coming to a head in the middle of 2015, during a previous exhibition at the Anna Schwartz Gallery. Parr became so dissatisfied with the series of self-portrait prints he presented at this previous exhibition that he painted over all of them, irrespective of whether Anna Schwartz had sold the work or not. Dark Cave sees Parr continuing to use painting as his chosen medium, but this time he has employed an approach that incorporates the lessons learnt from his past crises. For this body of work, Parr established a working method that applies a time constraint to the completion of each uniformly sized, unstretched canvas. No more than nine hours was allocated to the completion of every work, a precondition that has enabled Parr to treat the act of painting as a method through which he can re-assess the trajectory of his wider practice, whilst establishing vital psychological boundaries between his person and his art.
Parr’s practice has consistently focussed on testing the limits of conceptualisations of the body through acts of public endurance. Sometimes this has meant the violent testing of precisely his own body; sometimes it has involved interrogating the wider body politic of the Australian nation state. The extremely demanding performances he has undertaken towards these ends (physically, mentally or otherwise) have established Parr as one of Australia’s most confronting and, consequently, infamous art personalities. However, these performances do not come without a