Rhett Brewer has worked and exhibited as a professional artist and art lecturer since 1981. During this time his work has evolved stylistically towards the Realism and mostly urban subject matter we see today.
Much of his recent work depicts the built environment. The shadows are often long and the skies are often dark. The romance of ordinary things often combined with strong formal compositions which are more commonly associated with geometric abstraction and the kind of quirky observations that are often found in Pop and Surrealist paintings. Into this mix we often find an ironic nostalgia for the modernism of the recent past.
Brewer’s latest exhibition, at Depot Gallery, brings to a Sydney audience selected works from his recent exhibitions in non-commercial spaces including selected works from: ‘A Stranger in Town’, which was a solo project at the Rockhampton Regional Art Gallery in August 2013; and eight paintings contributed to the ‘Suburban Noir’ exhibition at The Museum of Sydney last summer. The exhibition also includes works from his new series ‘Cooma Gothic’ (from the Kelton Plains Artist in Residency courtesy of Defiance Gallery and Sally Madigan), and looks at ongoing themes – Decay, Renewal, Light, Memory and Time.
These thematically related works explore the character of distinct geographic regions from the artist’s recent travels from Rockhampton in tropical central Queensland to the sparse, and often bleak Monaro plains near Cooma. The shabby streets of Sydney’s suburban streets of the 1960’s are also explored and interpreted through access to police forensic photographs of crime scenes.
It is a Gothic Australia that is depicted with long shadows, nocturnal scenes and images of the abandoned and neglected which occasionally evokes the possibility of transcendence.
Depot Gallery
Until July 26
Sydney
Skull Car, 2014, oil on canvas, 49 x 49cm
Crash, 2013, oil on canvas, 30 x 49cm
Courtesy of the artist
