But Mike Parr says shock is a vital part of all modern art, and makes no apologies for revealing all sides of his personality in his experimental work – even if this once entailed pretending to cut off his own arm in front of an audience, most of whom were unaware his arm had been deformed from birth.

One of Australia's most controversial and influential artists, Parr has been experimenting across multiple art forms since the 1970s, and his new exhibition at the National Gallery of Australia is a major retrospective of his provocative career.

He said working across different media was essential to his practice, but that many of his works began with performance.

"A performance is very immediate, you take an enormous risk, you don't know what's going to happen really, you get something clear in your head but that's merely a starting point," he said.

"Sometimes people say to me, 'Why do you such extreme performances?' And I say well, they enable me to think. So what I mean is that after I've done a performance, I suddenly can work a lot of things out."

The exhibition, which opens on Friday, is a vast installation spanning nine galleries, and includes performance, film, sculpture, drawing, printmaking and photography.

"I have prevailing concerns about the current ideas that I work with, images and memories and so on, and I re-conceive them in different media because it enables me to sort of arrive at different levels of content," he said.

The show includes works that have not previously been on display, including a suite of distorted portrait photographs Self Portraits through Mother's Glassware, as well as a room devoted to performances on film, juxtaposed so that the viewer can see how much his work has changed over the years.

"I'm very interested in memory, and I'm very interested in the unconscious, and the way it sort of bursts forth in the form of images, so the early parts of the exhibition are quite confronting," Parr said.

"But in the foyer, I must say, there's this rather beautiful pop-up space, which is nearly confined entirely to language pieces, and outside this space on the curved wall we've got 40 beautiful vitrines... and I've displayed 45 years of diaries. So the foyer's got all of this text, and it's very intimate."

He said he was aware that his work was considered difficult by most audiences, but that he had deliberately meted out the more confronting aspects of his work throughout the exhibition.

"It becomes perhaps more cerebral and more accessible to thinking, not just feeling, and by the final room, it's quite abstract, political and sort of resolved. At the end of the journey I emerge as a different sort of person," he says.

"The shock is necessary because I think it's important to as an artist not to self-censor, so I think you've got to take the risk and reveal all sides of your personality and not apologise for it. I think that's also the essence of contemporary art."

Mike Parr: Foreign Looking opens at the National Gallery of Australia on August 12 and runs until November 6. Entry is free.