DRURY BRENNAN

Drury Brennan is a calligraphy artist and ceramicist living and working in Berlin. His calligraphy work explores the relationship between modern street graffiti and Asian calligraphy while maintaining heavy undertones from his experience as a jazz drummer. Like graffiti, Brennan’s use of text is large, abstract, and painterly; the semantic content is always significant yet it is often subordinate to the raw visual abstraction of the characters. Brennan’s fascination with letters began when he moved to Los Angeles, CA at the age of eight where he was exposed to street art, but he was not introduced to calligraphy until shortly after he left graduate school in 2012.

 

Brennan creates his calligraphy pieces with a variety of material including pens, ink, paint and markers. His work references both the craftsmanship of medieval manuscripts and the radical image appropriation of pop art. He is very much a romantic with his love for old art forms but the work Brennan is doing is undeniably cutting edge contemporary. The images and techniques he is using firmly situate the work as being created in the 21st century and his imagery and content address current social justice issues including violence against women and the absurdity of consumer culture and social media.  

 

In addition to his calligraphy work Brennan also creates functional ceramic forms. He is a master ceramicist with a keen eye and dexterous hand for functionality. While his early work is traditional in form, function and aesthetics, the surface of his more recent work has transitioned into seamless appropriations of modern printed images and abstract text. Brennan’s use of porcelain white forms creates a canvas for his images – allowing them to supersede the structure of the piece; in this way he has pushed his ceramic work out of the Neoclassical and Romantic periods and into the realm of modernism with clear structural references to Dada and Surrealist Art of the early 1900s through the 1950s. With regards to his decal work – “Floral Series”, “Black and Whites”, and “Lee Kratzer Series” – each piece is unique in the selection of images and their composition, but as a whole they are a cohesive collection of beautiful ceramic collages. When Brennan’s ceramics are not constructed with decals they are glazed with abstract text using a glaze pencil; others are covered in carved text that is accentuated by the glazes. These pieces are much more closely related to Brennan’s current calligraphy work and are even more contemporary in the sense that they have moved from romanticism into the style of Abstract Expressionism associated with the 1940s and 1950s.

 

Drury Brennan was born on April 18, 1981 in St. Paul, Minnesota but grew up in Los Angeles. Since the age of twelve Brennan has worked almost a dozen different jobs in a variety of fields; in high school he was a phone psychic and after graduating he had a position at Interscope Records; he worked as an assistant at a music store on the Sunset Strip, at a Kinko's Copies in Sherman Oaks, as receptionist for a bank, an editor of Flaunt Magazine in Los Angeles, and a ceramics teacher at Bitter Root studio. All of these experiences among many others – traveling to Japan and creating a photo essay, and moving to Berlin – have had profound influences on his work. His architectural photography in particular demonstrates his affinity for structure and repetition – both strong elements of design that are present in his calligraphy pieces.

 

Drury Brennan has shown both large and small pieces in formal galleries – he currently has a prestigious show at the Chicago Cultural center, Die Welt – but much of Brennan’s work is also done outside on windows and walls. Each piece, whether it is in a gallery or outside is site specific and speaks volumes about the cultural and social structures of the setting in which it is created. Brennan treats his art as both an occupation and a form of meditation, as aggressive yet delicate. Each time he sits down to create a piece guidelines are drawn and ink is mixed but the piece is, at its heart, an improvisation, a free-form verse – a wild, rhythmic experiment in the fusion of classical beauty and new age construction.