Oestrogen

Angela Brennan's exhibition of exuberant abstract oil paintings on linen at Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery offers the viewer a primal encounter with colour, form and mark making in paint. Interaction with Brennan's paintings goes beyond a visual experience. They are felt as much by the body as anything else, as though there were some umbilical connection between the viewer and the viewed.

The twenty-or-so works in the exhibition range in size from toy-like to monumental and Brennan's stylistic repertoire is varied. Sweet, busy little drippy and dotted grids, such as Views and Details I and II, are displayed alongside very large paintings such as Found Landscape I: a field of great, pregnant forms, brushily rendered and black outlined that degenerate at one point into a melancholic curtain of dark pink rain. Compare the slow and free-floating square-round amoeba shapes (a recurring motif in Brennan's work) of Every night about this time (2002) with the architectonic Between three oceans which has been forcefully structured with broad white strokes. Espace Rouge exhibits a similarly dramatic scaffolding. Brennan's paintings heighten our awareness of the movement and proximity of forms in space but also incorporate a temporal dimension. Two paintings, Here and now (1) and (2), recreate the material structure of their own woven supports. It is as though the warp and weft of the canvas has been indicated by Brennan with her vertical and horizontal painted stripes and drips, and that these in turn designate the coinciding spatial and temporal axes.

Brennan begins her paintings with unstretched canvases lying flat on the floor, working them from every direction. She paints several canvases at once, applying thin glazes of highly-keyed paint over white-primed linen to give maximally luminous colour. Brennan's canvases are many layered. Definitely controlled shapes sit over loose, brushy expanses and are woven into the composition by drips and secretions of paint that go up, down and across, as the artist lets her paint follow its own will in the formation of liquid grids of colour.

Angela Brennan presently works principally with abstract painting although her work of the 1980s also incorporated 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. Brennan's 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 and overseas, including New York, Israel and Singapore. In 2003 Brennan will participate 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. Oestrogen will be her fifth solo exhibition with the Gallery.