William Breen’s latest exhibition presents a fresh series of his ever-popular urban landscapes. Focusing on the streets and laneways of inner Melbourne, Breen’s images are revered for their intricate attention to detail, vivid colouration and surreal lack of human presence.
Catalogue Essay by Laura Kirkham, 2023Doughnut Time is a seemingly flippant name for an exhibition. For those who are not familiar with William Breen’s work, it might denote paintings bursting with colour and cartoon-like life. All the more so upon learning that the exhibition’s subject is urban Melbourne streets. The busy, brash walls of Hosier Lane come to mind. What those who experience Breen’s work know is the transcendent tranquillity of his meticulous paintings. For the artist, his subject is more than Melbourne’s streets, it is also light and shadow. His subjects are bathed in an ethereal glow that borders on the unnatural. Not merely bursting with life, his works are alive with a near-spiritual essence.
It is important to note that Breen’s perspective is not imposed. Rather, he captures still moments that are often overlooked in favour of the contemporary romance of the inner-city bustle. In landscape painting the artist’s viewpoint is apparent and art historically categorised: the picturesque, the ideal and the sublime. The picturesque painter finds the most aesthetic subject, the idealist renders the landscape in their image of ultimate beauty, while those preoccupied with the sublime look to the essence of their surroundings in search of the intangible qualities that give it life – and give us meaning. Breen’s viewpoint lies firmly in the sublime. He explains that the sublime cannot be sought-out, but rather avails itself in unexpected moments. Breen finds his urban subjects while walking through the streets of Melbourne’s inner north, experiencing a place, a particular time of day in a particular light that cannot be revisited – except upon the canvas.
Listening to Breen speak of his practice, I’m reminded of ‘Walking in the City’, an essay from philosopher Michel de Certeau’s 1980 text, The Practice of Everyday Life. In the essay, de Certeau creates an analogy between language and the practice of walking around urban centres. Everyday wanderings and back road turns act in opposition to the structured expectations of city living devised by town planners and architects. They create individual dialogues with the urban environment. Walking, de Certeau explains, bestows lived experience to the lifeless and rigid components of city structures, comparative to “what the speech act is to language or to the statements uttered.” (de Certeau, 1980 p. 97)
Breen’s approach to his subject is similar to de Certeau’s reflections on the urban landscape. Walking around his city, down the side streets, on the unplanned routes of his everyday, Breen is in dialogue with his environment. It reveals to him moments of light, shadow and time that exist outside of planned experiences and the hard edges of the inner city. In these moments, Doughnut Time is not just a punchy name emblazoned on a store front, or a catchy title of an exhibition, but a moment of urban poetry and sublime experience. With his street scenes painted from an eye-level viewpoint and at generous scale, William Breen shares his experiences of the city like windows of divine revelation.
ARTIST BIO: William Breen has been a finalist in the Arthur Guy Memorial Prize, Tattersalls Art Prize, Doug Moran Portrait Prize, the Brett Whiteley Scholarship, the Redlands Westpac Art Award, the Geelong Art Prize and the Nillumbik Art Prize, the Conrad Jupiter Art Prize, and the John Leslie Art Prize. Breen has been shortlisted for the prestigious Wynne Prize at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, and the Fleurieu Peninsula Biennale Art Prize. In 2023 his work was exhibited alongside Rick Amor and Andrew Browne in Romancing the Street, a group exhibition celebrating the streetscapes and buildings of this great city of Melbourne/Naarm held at The Townhall Gallery, Hawthorn.
He is represented in corporate and private art collections in Australia, the United States, and the United Kingdom including the RACV Collection, Macquarie Bank, Bendigo Art Gallery, Gippsland Art Gallery, Deakin University, Artbank, City of Perth, National Australia Bank, LaTrobe University Melbourne, Loyola College, Melbourne and the City of Whitehorse Collection. He has been exhibiting with Flinders Lane Gallery since 2000.
