Angela Brennan: New Paintings Essay by Serena Bentley | 06.06.23
Artwork: Black hole and colours from the art shop (2), oil on linen, 149 x 136.5cm
Angela Brennan: New Paintings
By Serena Bentley
To view an Angela Brennan painting is to be embraced by colour. The artist’s iconic combinations of radiating hues and soft forms are atmospheric, an effect enhanced by their often immersive scale. It is almost as if you can breathe them in. To be in their presence is to be acutely aware of your own body in relation to the work and a lively invitation to the eye and, indeed, the heart. For Brennan's world is deeply shaped by emotion and intuition.
While Brennan’s oeuvre encompasses figurative and text based paintings and more recently ceramics, she is perhaps best known for her abstractions, and in the 1990s became one of the leading Melbourne figures associated with reworking the ideas of colour-based abstraction. Brennan’s abstract paintings have a distinct ‘feel’ evoked through their buoyant colours, forms and surfaces that are whimsically underpinned by the concepts of analytical philosophy (with its emphasis on language) and the logic of ‘imagined worlds’.
In March I visited Brennan’s East Brunswick, Melbourne studio to view the works in progress for this exhibition, the artist’s first with Jan Manton Gallery. Canvases were positioned in a manner that permitted easy movement between them, with multiple works in progress simultaneously. Materialising amongst the lively colours was a cluster of largely monochromatic paintings that loosely embrace the grid - an icon of twentieth century abstraction. But rather than focus on the tight rigidity of the grid, Brennan is instead enticed by the potential of the weave; a coming apart, loosening or rearranging that for the artist has potentially infinite permutations. Brennan observes;
“The black, white and grey palette emphasises a linear element while my paintings with more colour focus on form. Black and white can behave like a drawing but also a tonal painting - a world unto itself.”[1]
The dialogue between these two approaches permeate the body of work as a whole, evidenced in the underlying compositional elements of shape, colour and line.
In Big Hippy and Little Hippy, boldly coloured lines are released from the grid and laid out specimen-like amongst corresponding circles and squares. These marks sit atop bare canvas that heightens their pure colour and materiality. Visiting You Again contains scumbled purple rectangles overlaid by bright squares of peach and blue that boldly reframe fragments of the composition. Small yet piercing black dots dominate several of the canvases, peppered amongst compositions singularly or in groups. In Black hole and colours from the art shop (2) the title perhaps alludes to space or a universe outside of the painting itself, matched by a frank description of the artist’s materials. This is typical of Brennan’s titles which can change or complicate straight readings of the work, often with levity and humour.
Brennan’s paintings invite us into the warm comfort of her universe, a space in which thoughts and feelings can spill and unfurl into new and endless possibilities. By gently summoning our inner lives Brennan encourages us to engage with ourselves and with her work in new and unknown ways.
Artwork: Visiting you again, 2023, oil on linen, 110.5 x 76.5cm.
[1] Angela Brennan in email correspondence with the author, Monday 8 May 2023
About the writer:
Serena Bentley is a curator and art writer with over fifteen years’ experience working across the institutional, commercial and non-profit arts sectors in Aotearoa and Australia. She has held curatorial positions at ACMI and the National Gallery of Victoria and is currently Senior Curator and Exhibitions Manager at Tauranga Art Gallery Toi Tauranga.