As Butler points out, there have been some major Mike Parr exhibitions in the last decade or so, but they have tended to focus on a narrow section of his wider practice (such as the 2006 exhibition Volte Face, at MCA in Sydney, which featured the artist’s self- portraits). The NGA show brings all of the various threads of Parr’s practice together into a synchronistic whole. “The exhibition is like a singular work in its own way,” Butler says. Foreign Looking showcases Parr’s prints, performances, drawings, sculptures and films. “It shows the inter-relationship between all of these things, and the early work and late work,” he explains. For Butler, these juxtapositions and dialectics foster new insights into Parr’s complex practice. “So yes,” he says. “I think people will get a surprise.”

Despite highlighting Parr’s dexterity in multiple mediums, and his innovations in film and printmaking, Butler points out that performance is still what drives all of Parr’s diverse work. “I think in all these fields he has done extraordinary things. But all of his work is performative in one way or another,” he explains. “You could say his printmaking is performative printmaking.”

In the early 1970s Parr was a pioneer, pushing both his own body and the notion of what art could be beyond conventional limits. Though performance art has entered the mainstream, Parr continues to push boundaries, subvert the status quo and pack a political punch. In Aussie, Aussie, Aussie, Oi, Oi, Oi [UnAustralian], 2003, as a protest against the jingoism that flourished during the John Howard era, Parr had his face painfully bound with thread and invited the public to torture him with electrical shocks. In his recent performance at the Sydney Biennale, BDH, 2016, Parr handed out leaflets on climate change, poured petrol on hundreds of his own prints (reputedly valued at approximately $750,000) and set them on fire to the tune of ‘Burning Down the House’ by Talking Heads.