Angela Brennan’s new exhibition Tête-à-tête & Vis-à-vis at Art Gallery of Ballarat will be running between 10 February – 21 April 2024.
Excerpt from exhibition essay by Amelia Winata
“Angela Brennan’s massive canvases almost kiss the ceiling of her home studio. Huge shapes dance across the surface of the pictures, as though untethered from the layers of oil paint below. A blurry-edged orange square softly dissolves into a milky sea below, a wobbly crimson stripe hovers above a fuchsia pink sky. Somewhat apologetically, Brennan tells me her work is formalist. Although she really need not apologise for identifying her practice as such. To be formally inclined is not necessarily to be shackled to the conventions of a male-dominated, hard-edged abstraction. Nor is it to be a slave to decoration, to the vacuousness of form over substance. What the viewer comes to realise when viewing the exhibition Tête-à-tête & Vis-à-vis is that Brennan’s work rewrites the stale narrative that dominates the history of formalism. In the artist’s own words, these paintings represent ‘ontological states of being,’ brimming with life and energy.”
Angela Brennan, String Theory, 2023, Oil on linen, 220 x 180 cm
Left: Angela Brennan, Why is that?, 2023, Oil on linen, 220 x 180 cm & Right: Angela Brennan A finely tuned universe, 2023, Oil on linen, 220 x 180 cm
Angela Brennan, Atoms & Passions , 2023, Oil on linen, 220 x 180 cm
“Recently, Brennan has been listening to cosmology and astrophysics podcasts while painting and she has described the way in which the study of space – its structure, the history of the universe – is rooted in mathematics and science despite its overarching bizarreness and ultimate unknowability. In other words, mystery clashes with absolute empiricism. This thirst for something tangible, while hard to grasp, comes through in Brennan’s works. They shimmer beyond the frame they inhabit and point towards something that is always on the cusp of being there, of being named, and yet disappears just as quickly.”
Angela Brennan, Tell me more, 2023, Oil on linen, 220 x 180 cm & Angela Brennan, Tête-à-tête, 2023, Wax coated mild steel, 207 cm (diameter) x 75 cm (height), Fabricated by Groove Fab, Melbourne
About the writer:
Amelia Winata is a Melbourne-based writer and curator. She is currently Curator in Residence at Gertrude and is a founding editor of Memo Review. In 2023, Winata completed a PhD at the University of Melbourne on the post-war West German artist Charlotte Posenenske.
All artwork and exhibition images by Ben Cox.