Never Closer, Martin Browne Contemporary Sydney 2021

Made while we’ve all been at home these past eighteen months, this new painting series stages the domestic amidst fanciful travels, to imagine where we truly belong in the world.

The paintings are atmospheric in scale, inviting you to journey through homely yet unworldly scenes, and discover tiny treasures of detail. Vast distances meld together seamlessly to create comforting new realms, that feel both like fond memories and dreams. These paintings offer a spaciousness, that respond to this unique moment of meditative solitude, and express a wistful longing for faraway lands.

With borders intensified at international, state, and even local levels, there’s been added attention to who belongs where. These paintings mix up cultural references to question, whether home can be grounded in just a single place - when so many of us connect on all different levels to various parts of the world.

There are clothes drying outside shanties, Zen rock gardens, deserted tropical marketplaces, and iconic suburban houses, set against sweeping landscapes of forests, mountains, and lakes. They are testament to the cultural traces we each inhabit in our bodies, through our memories, our experiences, our ancestry, or even just our interests: both individually and through our collective consciousness.

These paintings carry the warmth of the home, and yet span great distance - to remind us that through our shared imagination, the world is merely a thought away. Near, far, and yet never closer.

This exhibition has been assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body.

Away House
138 x 199 cm
Oil on linen

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Awash
138 x 199 cm
Oil on linen

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Stones Throw
199 x 285 cm (diptych, each panel 199 x 138 cm)
Oil on linen

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Tunnel Vision
138 x 199 cm
Oil on linen

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Rescue
138 x 199 cm
Oil on linen

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Between a Rock
199 x 148 cm
Oil on linen

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