Romancing the Streetscape showcases evocative images of inner-city scenes: streetscapes, parks, and buildings iconic to Melbourne.
The exhibition features work from Rick Amor, William Breen, Andrew Browne, Mark Chu, Robert Clinch, Cathy Drummond and Dani McKenzie, whose paintings reveal unique perspectives of urban existence and our shared experiences of place within this community. Images reflect the romanticism often associated with traditional landscape painting. The resulting portrait of Melbourne is both endearing and surprising, encouraging us to appreciate the metropolis around us and the overlooked in the everyday.
William Breen, Wet Paint, 2020, gouache on paper, 47 × 70cm. Courtesy the artist and Flinders Lane Gallery, Melbourne
McKenzie creates moody, atmospheric night scenes where the mundane of the everyday is infused with mystery. And Chu presents a series of new works with a focus on Glenferrie Road, in its many dimensions and eras, functioning from retail to corporate, local to multinational.
Amor’s paintings from the last decade will be on display, featuring his signature muted pallet applied to streetscapes and buildings, and lone figures dwarfed by their urban surrounds. Breen’s skill in depicting Victoria’s regional landscapes and the distinctly Melburnian streetscapes of Fitzroy and Carlton results in images that speak of suspended moments, full of possibility and a heightened sense of awareness. And Browne creates uncanny, strange or surreal moods through paintings that highlight both the artificial and subjective – on display is a series of paintings depicting urban textures of Melbourne in skilfully rendered, macro compositions.
Clinch’s opalescent egg-tempera paintings and beautifully hand-drawn lithographs are expressions of a seemingly realistic, but fictional world – major landmarks of Melbourne’s skyline, such as the MCG, will be on view. Drummond’s paintings record a past period of the inner-northern suburbs and its community which is now altered not only by the march of time but also by the demographic force of the property boom – showcasing a number of paintings depicting urban scenes, including shop fronts and apartment blocks.
Town Hall Gallery
18 January 2022 to 15 April 2023
Melbourne
