Gallery 2
25 November - 6 December 2026
Opening Night
27 November | 6 - 8 pm
The exhibition closes at 3 pm on the final day.
ARTIST STATEMENT
Martin Breeze paints to find out what happens, rather than to execute a predetermined image.
The works in Days Old Flowers. Unpaid Rent. have been built through repeated acts of addition, removal, covering and starting again. Shapes appear, disappear and return altered. Some suggest architecture, figures, vessels or invented objects, but their identity is deliberately unstable.
Breeze is increasingly interested in removing rather than adding. A painting can easily be made more convincing, more balanced or more resolved. The harder decision is to leave something awkward, exposed or uncertain and resist the instinct to correct it.
This process requires a degree of surrender. Earlier decisions remain visible beneath later ones. Accidents are allowed to redirect the work. Areas that might once have been repaired are left alone.
There is no intended narrative connecting these paintings and no single meaning to uncover. What connects them is the process of trying to interfere less, trust what has happened and recognise the moment when another decision might take more from the painting than it gives.
Breeze is not trying to get the paintings right. He is interested in seeing what happens when they almost fall apart.
Martin Breeze, 2026
ARTIST BIOGRAPHY
Martin Breeze is a Melbourne-based contemporary artist working primarily in acrylic on canvas. After a long career spanning music, design and operations, he began painting seriously in 2019, developing an instinctive practice centred on abstraction, mark-making and the tension between control and accident.
His work has been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions and art fairs in Melbourne and Sydney, and is held in private collections throughout Australia and internationally. Breeze’s paintings resist fixed narratives, often beginning with recognisable forms before being repeatedly painted over, dismantled and rebuilt. He is interested in the point at which an image feels close to falling apart, and in having the courage to stop before it becomes resolved.
Breeze lives and works in Melbourne, Australia.