New Paintings - Online Exhibition

William Breen's online exhibition presents a wonderful new series of paintings exploring the vast beauty of Victoria's regional landscapes.

'Full of turbulent clouds, flushed pink by a setting sun or bruised grey in anticipation of an approaching storm, it is the sky that dominates these new works. Stratus and cumulus serve to create a blanket of temporal awareness, their transient forms reinforcing the solid and fixed nature of the terrain below. Diffuse light, pre-dawn or post-dusk, seeps through the clouds, softly illuminating the surface of things, while hiding others in shadow. It is here within the light of the sky that time’s passing is metered, trapped, slowed down, where a moment of contemplation can be realised, where a single shot of elated connectedness can take place.Simultaneously stretching out toward the limits of the frame and pushing deeply into the pictorial interior, Breen’s landscapes exist in delicate balance: the proportion of sky to ground, the tonal transitions of light to dark, the curving undulation of paddock to fence, the slope of a craggy cliff face as it meets the smooth edge of the ocean. Meticulous and yet by no means photo-real or hard edged, there is a deliberate blur to his finely detailed images, a soft bleed of one form into another, that acts as a threshold into a suspended moment.Making art from the need to contemplate is a means to sit with and spend time in the silent company of the world and its elements. William Breen unassumingly asserts his ability to capture more than that which can be seen in a single encounter. Breen presents a view of the landscape as both external and internal, awe inspiring in its enormity and endurance, and yet comforting in it’s rhythms and cycles. We mark out our time in its presence.'

Excerpt from esssy by Phe Luxford

ARTIST PROFILEFlinders Lane Gallery first exhibited William Breen’s paintings in 2000.  He 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. 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.