Angela Brennan: Every morning I wake up on the wrong side of capitalism
Everything in Angela Brennan’s art cooperates in leading us astray. Across a career now spanning three decades, Brennan’s practice has been anything but fashion-conscious or prescriptive in style, having travelled successfully, and somewhat audaciously, between the painterly modes of abstraction, still life, portraiture and what she has described as ‘text painting’. Approaching and sensing the world ‘lightly’ (thoughtfully not frivolously) and in a distinctly visual way, all manner of subjects—whether a recipe, a landscape, or philosophical musing—are met with a painter’s eye, and translated into an atmosphere of colour and shape. Concerned with a mode of enquiry that values openness, connectivity and changeability, Brennan arrives at a creative discourse that is full of possibilities and unpredictable deviations, where styles, subjects and influences collide.
Engaging with Brennan’s art means to slip vicariously into the artist’s personal world: her family and the people who inform her surroundings; her home and the places she visits or would like to traverse; the art, music, literature, or philosophy she enjoys or finds meaning in; and the endless flow and intertwinement of all these things. That is not to suggest that her paintings should be interpreted as autobiographical accounts; subjects of personal significance are often fragmented or layered with multiple allusions. Cutting across the manifold styles and subject matter employed is a decisively subjective standpoint and its painterly corollary: an unashamed delight in the sensuous qualities of paint.
The full extent of Brennan’s oeuvre, as it was revealed at the survey exhibition ‘Every morning I wake up on the wrong side of capitalism’ at the Monash University Museum of Art (MUMA)1, attests to her immersion in the production and potential of her medium