From catalogue essay to Altered Images Exhibition
(The Organisation of Hope – many tiny empowerments)

If Abigail O’Brien draws on art historical references and religious ritual to represent such unresolved tensions within everyday living, Thomas Brezing’s paintings draw on fairytales, Disney characters, graphic images of circuses and the carnivalesque, presenting seemingly innocent worlds with ominous and threatening undercurrents. His themes confront major issues – globalisation, pollution, the environment, migration, feelings of displacement, of cultural homelessness – and he tackles dark subjects that are close to the bone, personal histories that reckon with the burden of responsibility.

Lucy Cotter has written eloquently of his work and its cathartic impulse – of Brezing’s ability to ‘bring repressed feelings and fears to consciousness’. Here a sort of mania imbues these magnificently patterned worlds – Did Germany put the sun there? – a silhouette of shadows and tumbling acrobats. His aesthetic is clearly lodged within the German tradition of German Expressionist painting, medieval woodblock prints, Romanticism, Paul Klee and the fairytales into which he bravely fuses cartoon colour from Disney’s palette. And yet, within such pretty colour and highly aesthetic surface pattering, Brezing’s saturated scenes speak of darker realities. They are in ways like the work of African-American artist Kara Walker, who uses the silhouette as a narrative device for the telling of histories too gruesome for other formats. Brezing’s work has, as Aidan Dunne writes, a ‘wintry feel’.