Anne Brennan
Limbs
14 Feb - 25 Feb 2024
G2
Opening Night
Friday 16 Feb | 6 - 8pm
◼︎
Anne Brennan’s paintings of forests, urban limbs and canopies are a celebration of life, regeneration and renewal. A piece might start with a place or a memory: a forest trek, a suburban walk, or a childhood journey. For example: the Horizontal Forest II painting refers to her mother’s stories of growing up in a small town on the West coast of Tasmania, afraid of the surrounding forests. The Newport Lakes series pays homage to trees grown on an old rubbish tip to create a welcoming urban forest. Once something to be tamed and felled, the paintings remind us of the need to preserve and respect old growth forests and urban canopies for cooling, carbon capture and habitat.
To express the grandeur and beauty of intertwined branches and limbs her paintings hint at the stylized limbs seen in church decorations of late Renaissance and Baroque eras. Originally captivated by the resemblance of tree limbs to human forms, her paintings take on a mythic quality of their own. Canopy patterns create negative spaces and encourage a skyward gaze as cathedrals once did. Her use of techniques from this period, including light and dark, soft shadings and multiple layers of paint (glazing) aims to create a sense of awe once reserved for religious myth.
Her style can be described as abstract realism. The abstract imagined elements allow the viewer to interpret these paintings however they resonate.
While Anne has participated in several shows and competitions in the last 15 years, this is her first solo show.
Contact
Phone : (03) 9482 3550
mail@redgallery.com.au
Address
157 St Georges Rd
Fitzroy North, Victoria, 3068
Map
How to get here
Tram: route 11
Stop 21 just north of Edinburgh Gardens
Melway ref: 30B12
Parking in nearby streets
Bus: 504 (Reid Street)
