1990s

1989-90

Elaine de Kooning dies on February 1, 1989 in Southampton, New York. 

Paul Harris: Works in Bronze opens at the Iannetti-Lanzone Gallery on April 13, 1989 and is on view until May 20. The show travels to the Constantine Grimaldis Gallery in Baltimore where it is shown from September 6 to September 30, 1989, and to the Galerie Redmann in Berlin on view from February 14 to March 20, 1990. The survey includes examples in bronze made by Harris in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, including: Anna in Love (1987), Anna Turning (1989), and Woman Bending Over (1978). In the accompanying exhibition catalogue, critic, and poet Bill Berkson writes that, “Gravity in Paul Harris’s sculptures is primary and emphatic in ways that nothing else about them is. How the object sits, lays, stands, or leans—the general position that orients you it as a three-dimensional image in the space of a room—makes the first impression. Once oriented, you notice a conundrum: the weighty, tactile presence thus deposited has a resonance and scale not there to be grasped at all, an elusiveness suspended among the familiar shapes borne to view.” He adds, of the 1987 bronze Anna in Love, “You can see it, walk around it, even touch it, but you can’t get next to the body ostensibly at hand. The form is there, but the female figure is elsewhere, ‘other’ in time. The figment shows you everything and nothing; in fact it is truncated at both ends and hollow like a bell . . . ”⁵¹

Some of his bronzes and drawings are exhibited at the annual contemporary and modern art fair, Kunstmarkt 90, or Art Cologne in Cologne, Germany.

Participates alongside Richard Diebenkorn, Wayne Thiebaud, Nathan Oliveira, Paul Wonner (1920–2008), and others in Homage to Elaine de Kooning, at the 871 Fine Arts Gallery in San Francisco.

Anna Turning, 1989, bronze, 23 x 34 x 23 inches

1991

Completes the sweeping, angular Our Lady of Sorrows. “Among the most spare of Harris’s sculptures,” asserts Triplett, the striking work is in “dialogue with many of his referential bronzes of the 1980s and 1990s, the black, patinated bell shape is an oversized, pleated skirt in mid-swish, although the wearer is nonexistent.”⁵² Recalling this during remarks he made in 1991 to inaugurate the sculpture , Harris said that Our Lady of Sorrows emanated from this “simple drawing,” and that he “found great comfort in this drawing . . . A few months earlier my mother had died . . . Although she didn’t wear floor length skirts she must have had some robes or gowns that went to the floor . . . behind which I could hide. Something lost had been somewhat regained. A six year old had discovered that art has astonishing possibilities.”⁵³

Participates in the exhibition Sui Generis at the Galerie Redmann, Berlin.

Our Lady of Sorrows, 1991, bronze, 72 x 192 inches, University of New Mexico, Health Sciences Center Plaza, Gift of Douglas and Peggy Kirkland in memory of Billie Cannedy Earnest, 2002

Contact sheet showing different angles of Our Lady of Sorrows (1991), Paul Harris Archives

1992

Retires from teaching at the California College of Arts and Crafts.

1993

Paul Harris: Works in Wood / Works on Paper is on view at the Michael Himovitz Gallery in Sacramento, California on view from November 10 to December 4.

Exhibits work at the I. Wolk Gallery in St. Helena, California.

Wrongtree Press publishes Motives and Cues by Marguerite Harris.

Participates in a group show in memory of William Sawyer at the Sawyer Gallery, San Francisco.

1994

Participates in the exhibition, Die Dritte Dimension, at the Galerie Redmann, Berlin.

1995

Solo exhibition of bronzes and drawings at the Galerie Redmann, Berlin.

Wrongtree Press publishes Phases of the Moon, a collection of short stories by the artist.

Attends fiftieth reunion for the crew of the USS Ault in South Carolina.

Bronze sculpture and drawings exhibited at the Kunstmarkt 95, Cologne.

Publication announcement for Phases of the Moon (1995)

1996

Completes Paradise Variations, a portfolio of pencil on acetate editioned lithographs.

Receives Rounce and Coffin Club Award for Phases of the Moon (1995), which was exhibited in the fifty-fifth annual Western Book Exhibition, sponsored by The Rounce & Coffin Club in San Francisco and Los Angeles.

The Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery, University of Nebraska, Lincoln, exhibits the 1970 cloth on metal and wood sculpture, Norissa Rushing.

1997

Galerie Redmann, Berlin, includes his sculpture and drawings in the exhibition Friends of Kienholz.

The Woodson Art Museum, Wausau, Wisconsin exhibits the bronze Woman Lying Down in the Sculpture Garden from June 1997 to May 1998.

Bronze sculptures and drawings exhibited at the Kunstmarkt 97, Cologne.

Harris in his studio, 1959, Paul Harris Archives

1998

Paul Harris, Drawings is published by Wrongtree Press in association with the University of Washington Press.

1999

Receives solo exhibitions of sculptures and drawings at the Bolinas Museum in Bo­linas, California, on view May 8 to July 11. 

Paul Harris: Bronzes and Drawings is on view at the Fresno Art Museum in Fresno, California from November [Insert Day], 1999 to January [Insert Day], 2000. A text accompanying the exhibition, and to promote a public program with the artist, reads: “There is a sense of gravity born of personal discipline requiring that same pureness of simplicity found in the Shaker's utilitarian expression—or the same kind of silence found in Quaker worship that pervades Harris’s timeless world. There is a balance of geometric abstraction and natural anatomy as well as an element of elapsed time in the rounded figures and intersecting angular forms that activates the overall composition of many of his works.  It is work that has absorbed the purified abstractions of Constantin Brancusi and the formal language of Jacques Lipchitz. In all of Harris’ work there is a profound sense of care and precision—his eye as an artist, his irony as a survivor, his compassion as a humanist and his wit born of brilliance, result in a comprehensive body of work.”

  • ⁵¹Bill Berkson, Paul Harris: Works in Bronze (exhibition catalogue), 1989.

    ⁵²Triplett, “Paul Harris: Interior Interests.”

    ⁵³Paul Harris, “Our Lady of Sorrows Story,” undated, Paul Harris Archives

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