Intended Audience
Following several years of dividing his time between a small rural town in upstate New York and New York City, Brennan began to question his own relationship to the glorified idealism of nature experience and urban life. His dense paintings, labored over and shuttled between locations, have become riffs on landscape and a way to connect to the divergent ideas associated with these platitudes. While far from naturalist, shapes that conjure plunging hills, rugged rivers, grassy knolls, snow-capped mountains, and dense forests all tower and crumble within the paintings. Brennan extrapolates and renders these new elements with synthetic color, patterns, marbling, drawing, collage, and other modes of painting to further develop his signature abstractions. Stacking of shape, color, and composition creates movement across and into the picture plane, both obfuscating and allowing entrance into sections. Like natural elements forged over time, Brennan’s physical layering of material slows down the overall comprehension of his completed paintings, and allows them to continuously reveal subtle nuance and hidden detail.
Patrick Brennan lives and works in New York City has shown his paintings and videos nationally and internationally, including: MoMA / PS1, Galerie Lelong, Nicole Klagsbrun, Fitzroy, Cleopatra’s, Essex Flowers, Parrish Art Museum, Anthology Film Archives and Edward Thorpe Gallery in New York; Institute for Contemporary Art, Boston, V1 Gallery in Copenhagen, Cooper Cole in Toronto, Canada, Hiener Contemporary in Washington, DC, Anat Ebgi in Los Angeles, Albada Jeljersma, Amsterdam and Romer Young in San Francisco. Brennan was awarded a NYFA Fellowship in Painting in 2015. His work has been reviewed and published in The New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Hyperallergic, Modern Painters Daily and The Brooklyn Rail. Brennan is a founding member of Essex Flowers Gallery in New York City and is represented by Halsey McKay in East Hampton and Romer Young Gallery in San Francisco.
Artist House Residency: February 23 to March 9, 2018
This Artist House residency is sponsored by the Department of Art and Art History.