Martin Breeze is a Melbourne-based contemporary artist working primarily in acrylic on canvas.
Painting since the early 2000s, Breeze has developed a distinctive visual language of bold colour, gestural marks, fragmented figures and recurring forms. His work is held in private collections throughout Australia and internationally.
At the centre of his practice is curiosity. Rather than beginning with a fixed image or outcome, Breeze allows each painting to develop through a process of adding, removing, covering and responding to what has already happened on the canvas. Mistakes, unexpected marks and changes of direction are not corrected so much as absorbed into the work.
“I don’t paint to get it right. I paint to see what happens when it almost falls apart.”
His recent work has increasingly explored how little a painting needs in order to hold together. Forms are simplified, space is allowed to remain unresolved and familiar motifs appear without being fully explained. Vessels, figures and loosely constructed structures recur throughout the work, hovering somewhere between abstraction and recognition.
That uncertainty is deliberate. Breeze is interested in the point where control gives way to instinct, and where a painting can remain unresolved without feeling unfinished.
After years spent as a musician and songwriter, improvisation remains an important part of his approach. But painting offers something different: there is no score and no requirement to know where the work is heading before it begins.
For Breeze, painting is ultimately an exercise in curiosity and risk: making a mark, responding to it, and having the courage to stop before all the questions have been answered.