Angela Brennan: Tête-à-tête & Vis-à-vis

Angela Brennan’s massive canvases almost kiss the ceiling of her home studio. Huge shapes dance across the picture surface, 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 tube a slave to decoration, to the vacuousness of form over substance. What the viewer comes to realise when viewing 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.

—Amelia Winata