Review by Michael Richards, COURIER MAIL, Galleries Section, June 21, 1989, Dream Series exhibition, La Trobe Gallery, Paddington.

AT La Trobe Gallery, Cynthia Breusch’s relationship with her mother provides the theme for her exhibition of 37 sensuous and dreamlike oil pastels. The paintings celebrate the intimate friendship Breusch shared with her mother and explore Breusch's response and her need to re-define herself since her mother's death.

They are beautifully drawn and coloured images, haunting and surreal,

In which a woman communes with a world beyond this. That world may be interpreted as an after-life, a fantasy, memories or dreams. It does not matter which. For all of us there is a level of existence and experience that we cannot touch, and this is what Breusch explores.

Women emerge as luminous shadows and as vague and suggested forms out of an indeterminate ground. Some figures are so insubstantial they merge into the void.  Household objects - teacups, a coat hanger, a shoe - float through the atmosphere like fragments of memory that defy relegation to context.

This ground has been covered before, and it is difficult to view Breusch’s work without thinking of Charles Blackman especially. But Breusch has come to the genre from her own experience and expresses a very personal theme.

Her very lyrical and sensuous paintings can be seen until July 8.