Glenys Brookbanks attended Elam School of Fine Art, graduating with a BFA andhas been exhibiting since the late eighties. Her work is held in many of New Zealand’s top public and private collections: including a number of works in the Wallace Arts Trust, Te Papa Tongarewa, Fletcher Trust Collection, Les & Milly Paris Collection, John Weeks Collection, Grey College Collection, University of Auckland and Auckland City Council.
Brookbanks work was included in the City Gallery, Wellington’s 1995 influential show of contemporary New Zealand painting, A Very Peculiar Practice as well as the Govett Brewster’s seminal 1996 exhibition: Skirted Abstraction which was devoted to work by women abstract painters. Brookbanks is one of those women painters who take the minimalist colour field made by men and ruffle its hard edged surfaces to create work which the critic Justin Paton has named Diaphanism. Brookbanks takes the classical modernist grid structure and subverts the geometrical trellis by boring small holes in the gesso or tempera surface. On top of this ground this she makes washes of fine marks in pencil which contradict the superimposed grid’s regularity. The result is a painting of feather-like delicacy underpinned with a firm structure. Like Luise Fong, Glenys Brookbanks is concerned with the ” skin ” of her art. The viewer becomes interested in negotiating its many shifting surface changes. This is very different from the way we read the tightly constructed surfaces of earlier modern abstract painting in which plane, field and edge were of primary concern. Linda Tyler noted that Brookbanks’ painting ” offers a quiet homage to geometry which is touched with mystery“