FAITES L'AMOUR PAS LA GUERRE

In her current exhibition at Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Angela Brennan presents her new text paintings for the first time in Australia. Language has evolved in Brennan's world of primordial colour. The canvases range from small to large, brandishing slogans, sensual scraps of poetry and other language acts. The textual sources are many and various. Together, her exhibition is a bower of poetry and allusion. She has collected words like materials and transformed them into art. Increasingly, Brennan uses text in a way that is integral to the formal aspects of her abstraction. Words become glaze-like or function as structural elements both in their semantic content and the shapes and architecture of each letter. Language is close to colour in its power to invoke bodily sensation and communicate heady emotion. Brennan's wordplay speaks of pleasure and sensual delight.

Angela Brennan has previously worked principally with abstract painting although her work of the 1980s included figurative painting and installation work. She was recently included in the group exhibition, Good Vibrations: The Legacy of Op Art in Australia, at Heide Museum of Modern Art in Melbourne. She has been short-listed for numerous art prizes. Her paintings are held in every major public collection in Victoria as well as the National Gallery of Australia and numerous private collections both in Australia, New York, Israel and Singapore, including the Mont Blanc Art Collection in Switzerland. In 2003 Brennan participated in an artist-in-residency programme at the Red Gate Gallery at the Beijing Art Academy in China. Angela Brennan has been exhibiting with Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery since 1993. FAITES L'AMOUR PAS LA GUERRE will be her sixth solo exhibition with Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery.