Skull Series (I)

Notes

The making of these two watercolours by Brenner was recorded in 2022 in a short film commissioned by Strauss & Co to promote exploration and understanding of the watercolour medium for an auction highlighting its significance.

In the film, Brenner discusses and demonstrates aspects of the medium that are most challenging, and seductive. She is captured at play, or in tussle, with the seeming wildness or unpredictability of the medium as it pools, floods, spills and behaves with a mind of its own. She reigns it in, layers it, and imposes controlled structural marks to sustain a balance or tension between the loose and the deliberate.

These two examples of her work belong to an ongoing series in which she examines a human skull understanding it to be an extension of her longstanding work with portraiture, and the relationship between life and death, presence and absence. Her paintings are often monochromatic which she explains as being linked to a more sculptural sensibility, where form is described through manipulation of a material rather than through the addition of colour. In these delicately layered monochromatic watercolour paintings, she achieves a sense of the sculptural three-dimensionality of a skull.

Brenner's 2022 exhibition at SMAC gallery in Johannesburg showcased her portraits of four long-term sitters.