EXHIBITION IMAGES | WORKS | PRESS RELEASE | ARTIST PAGE
HALSEY MCKAY is pleased to present Free Fallin’, Patrick Brennan’s third solo exhibition with the gallery. The four paintings on view are adorned and embellished spaces that hint at the natural world. Following several years of dividing his time between a small rural town in upstate New York and the metropolis to its south, Brennan began to question his own relationship to the glorified idealism of nature experience and urban life. These dense new works, labored over and shuttled between both locations, became 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. Recent solo exhibitions have been with Halsey McKay, East Hampton, Romer Young Gallery, San Francisco, Essex Flowers, New York, as well as group shows at MOMA / PS1, Galerie Lelong, Nicole Klagsbrun, Monya Rowe Gallery, Zieher Smith, Edward Thorpe, Artists Space and Clifton Benevento, New York; Cooper Cole, Toronto, and V1, Copenhagen, Denmark. He is a Visiting Assistant Professor of painting at Alfred University and a 2015 recipient of a NYFA fellowship in painting. Brennan is a founding member of Essex Flowers in New York City.