Nau mai, haere mai, welcome to EyeContact. You are invited to respond to reviews and contribute to discussion by registering to participate.

JH

Cartoonish Abstractions of Matthew Browne

AA
View Discussion
Matthew Browne, Pages From a Life, 2010,  pencil, vinyl tempera and oilstick on 21 canvases, 40 x 200 mm each, 1550 x 2780 overall. Image courtesy the artist and Artis Matthew Browne, Mind Watcher, 2010, pencil, vinyl tempra, oilstick on canvas, 380 x 405 mm. Image courtesy the artist and Artis Matthew Browne, Interplay #9, 2010, copper, steel, tarlaton, vinyl tempera, and macrocarpa, 480 x 180 x 220 mm. Image courtesy the artist and Artis

Matthew Browne's painted lines and shapes here appear to allude to the physiognomies of personalities such as Mickey, Elmer, Pluto, Bugs and Goofy under Browne's abstract forms - with their buckling, stretched ovals and twisting squashed, pneumatic boomerangs. There is a large framed tray holding 21 small canvases - five of them brown linen and all carefully positioned for maximum ‘musical' effect.

Auckland

 

Matthew Browne
See Visions and Dream Dreams

 

30 June - 24 July 2010

This collection of paintings and sculpture by Matthew Browne includes intriguing works that seem to relate to animators’ drawings for cartoon films or comics. The lines have a fluidity reminiscent of cursive script with its diagonally aligned loops, and the drawings artists like Ub Iwerks, Walt Disney and Chuck Jones did for the talking heads and flexible moving bodies of animal characters.

In this country Mark Braunias and Robert McLeod have explored aspects of this terrain, as has the late Elizabeth Murray overseas. Matthew Browne’s painted lines and shapes here appear to allude to the physiognomies of personalities such as Mickey, Elmer, Pluto, Bugs and Goofy under Browne’s abstract forms - with their buckling, stretched ovals and twisting squashed, pneumatic boomerangs. There is a large framed tray holding 21 small canvases - five of them brown linen and all carefully positioned for maximum ‘musical’ effect.

These forms could be heads, feet, facial details like black glistening noses or ogling eyes, or sweeping arm and leg movements - all alluded to with pencil, vinyl tempera, and oilstick. The work Pages From a Life, has a dynamic complexity that the simpler, much larger single canvas paintings lack, a movement of surging arabesques and drooping forms. It is the best thing in the room, but some of the others include smeary Baconesque flourishes with kidney shapes, and tremulously quivering parallel contours that seem to be ‘movement lines’.

Browne’s sculptures are quite different. They present taut Gabolike tarlatan forms on curved outlines of copper tubing, inflected, bent sail shapes that seem to change in volume as you walk past. They are too small to seem to be other than preparatory maquettes, and lack the ‘sensitive’ pentimenti drawn (or erased) with paint onto the canvases. They have a baffling plodding clumsiness that contradicts the wiggling but entertaining nuances of the canvas ‘pages.’

The show comes with a small pamphlet containing an illustrated mini-essay by Ed Hanfling, discussing Clement Greenberg. I think because Browne is not interested in the modernist picture plane surface, he doesn’t really pertain to Greenberg’s theories, for he draws into the space, not onto it. However it’s nice that Hanfling is prodding the discussion along, even if it is somewhat antiquated.

John Hurrell

Print | Facebook | Twitter | Email

 

Recent Posts by John Hurrell

JH
Louise Bourgeois, The Couple, 2003, aluminum, on loan from a private collection. Photo: Christopher Burke, © The Easton Foundation. VAGA at ARS/Copyright Agency, 2025 |

Brilliant Visceral Bourgeois

AUCKLAND ART GALLERY TOI O TAMAKI

Louise Bourgeois


In Private View


Curated by Natasha Conland


27 September 2025 - 17 May 2026

JH
Nick Austin, Fear of Loneliness, 2025, mixed media, 2160 x 1800 x 200 mm overall, Detail.

The Potential Dangers of Seductive Art History, Perhaps?

COASTAL SIGNS

Nick Austin

 

Breath Spectrum

 

25 September 2025 - 25 October 2025

JH
Installation of Simon Denny's 'The Future' exhibition at Michael Lett.

Boom Boom: Hell on Earth

MICHAEL LETT

Simon Denny

 


The Future

 


3 September - 11 October 2025

JH
Ammon Ngakuru, Jonah and the Whale, 2025, oil on canvas, 1850 x 1650 mm; Maggie Friedman, Untitled (Jeff Koons, Party Hat, 1995-97, The Broad Museum Los Angeles, 2025), 2025, oil on canvas, two elements each 1830 x 1145 mm

Friedman and Ngakura @ Coastal Signs

COASTAL SIGNS

Maggie Friedman & Ammon Ngakura

 

Icon

 

Curated by Sally McMath

 

13 August - 13 September 2025