Luke Brennan and Len Lye

An exhibition of abstractionists, illuminating their own take nearly 100 years apart, where each call on “cues”, to signal stages, separations and synchronisation.
 
Both the paintings of Luke Brennan and the films of Len Lye take cues from gestures, both as a signal and action. Lye, with his “direct” camera-less animations created by painting directly onto celluloid to the cue of Cuban dance music (signal), and Brennan, with his ever-evolving layers of medium, waiting for their own cues — to dry, to warp, to combine — to then allow for the next process (action). 
 
Within both the films and sculptures of Lye, we find the artist’s commitment to the ‘art of movement’. Films like A Colour Box (1935), stimulate the senses through rhythmic cinematography, in an effort to affect viewers physically and emotionally with light, movement and sound. The audience methodically falls into the cues set by Lye. In this exhibition, Cheaper parcel post and paintings, the physical movement found on the screen and the orchestrated beguine it emits absorbs into Luke Brennan’s paintings. Composed of inquisitive surfaces, presenting a combination of candy-floss craquelure and damp slimy squalid baseness, the endless actions Brennan builds and compartmentalises within the works makes them feel living, as if they are in a form of ongoing mutation.
 
Cheaper parcel post and paintings — a nod to a proposed title of Lye’s film, and to Brennan’s sustained pictorial practice — calls upon cues of its own. Spaced out and staged, this is the second exhibition of 2026 where 1301SW has presented a pairing of both a historic and a contemporary figure (with Rose Nolan and Gordon Walters), to both call on their similarities, but to more-so focus on the overarching commonalities of art and the consideration of exhibition making.