Matthew Browne

Matthew Browne has exhibited widely in the UK and NZ, and, more recently, Australia. He achieved a Bachelor of Arts (Honours) in painting from Camberwell College of Art (London) and postgraduate qualifications in Fine Arts from the University of Auckland. Browne’s work has been hung as a Finalist in major prizes in NZ, such as the Wallace Art Awards and the New Zealand Painting and Printmaking Award, and he received an award of merit from the National Contemporary Art Award (Waikato Museum, NZ), in 2019. His work is highly acclaimed and held in private and public collections in NZ, Australia, UK, USA, Canada and Singapore.

“An understanding of Browne’s working process stimulates a level of awareness when we consider the delicate relationships shared by the formal elements of each work. The bounded shapes are enclosed by curvilinear and straight-edged lines, and characterised by a certainty and precision. Their solid forms sit confidently on the surface ..or hover transparently over lines or the natural linen canvas. They jostle with one another, pulsing with energetic and emotive colour.

These are not generic shapes; rather they are stretched or squashed in relation to one another. Browne’s intent is that these forms carry through an ambiguity of meaning: irregular shapes are less resolved and less bound: more interesting and more persuasive. These shapes have a palpable certainty about them; their presence is tempered by adjacent forms and secured by solid lines that travel through, behind and alongside them.” – Elisha Maserman (“Jouska”, Orexart, Auckland).

Read: Art News Aotearoa; ‘Matthew Browne’s Counter-Cacophony’, ahead of his presentation with Wagner Contemporary at Melbourne Art Fair 2024.

Watch: Dr. Fiona Pardington, Judge of the National Contemporary Art Award (Waikato), discussing Matthew Browne’s commended work, ‘Anecdoche’.