Press Release (PDF)

Exhibition Checklist (PDF)

Video Tour of Exhibition

Michael Brennan: Floating Weeds at Minus Space, by Kit White
Tussle Magazine, November 20, 2023

Michael Brennan’s Moving Images, Interview by Kim Uchiyama
Two Coats of Paint, November 10, 2023

Michael Brennan’s Online Artist Talk (YouTube)
Thursday, November 16, 2023, 7-8pm EST

MINUS SPACE is excited to present the exhibition Michael Brennan: Floating Weeds. This is the Brooklyn, NYC-based artist’s fourth solo exhibition at the gallery since 2006 and it premieres a suite of new paintings that continue his decades-long investigation into the traditions of gestural and geometric abstraction.

The title of Brennan’s exhibition is inspired by Japanese filmmaker Yasujiro Ozu’s work A Story of Floating Weeds (Ukigusa Monogatari) from 1934. A floating weed—the ukigusa plant or duckweed in English—is a prevalent metaphor in Japanese literary tradition. The plant, which is pushed by a river’s current and drifts aimlessly downriver, is symbolic of our own lives.

The paintings on view in Brennan’s exhibition were all produced during the pandemic (2020-2023) and serve as meditations on his experiences and studies during this unprecedented period. The artist drew inspiration from a rich variety of sources including the experimental Black Mountain College (1933-1957) in rural North Carolina, the profound Japanese literature and film traditions, and the wondrous art and architectural environment of Venice, Italy, where he teaches each summer.

The artist contemplates, “I tried to imagine what kind of painting I might’ve made had I been at Black Mountain. One painting is titled Black Mountain Stars, which is inspired by Michael Rumaker’s memoir Black Mountain Days. Japanese literature has shaped my sense of aesthetics. I study the cinematography of Japanese film because their directors scan vertically in addition to horizontally—a different approach to composition. Venice has influenced me in terms of its history, painting, and environment—the lagoon in particular.”

Brennan produces each painting in a single, uninterrupted session that could last up to several hours. No edits or additions are made to his paintings afterwards. He is specifically focused on the notion of mark making, rather than a kind of gestural expression in his work. He employs a rich array of singular hues, ranging from the visceral to the poetic, which have broadened to now include ancient pigments such as genuine ultramarine, lapis lazuli, and its impure byproduct, ultramarine ash. His materials have continued to evolve over the past few years and now feature powdered glass mixed into the paint. The artist also employs silver, instead of white, or even earlier cold wax, to both lighten his color palette and infuse it with a slight iridescence. His paint is also increasingly more fluid, which he continues to apply, maneuver, and remove with a palette knife, brush, and cloth.

Brennan continues, “The marks in my painting are an attempt to connect mind, spirit, and hand. I’m trying to develop the image and ground simultaneously through one coat of paint. I hope to extract three hues and/or values from one color. I tend to scale down, as in scale model, rather than scale up, intentionally keeping a small footprint. I’m engaged in a private practice rather than a public one. I positively follow Pauline Kael’s negative critique of Kurosawa, ‘a preoccupation with mountains, triangles, and threesies”. I question what’s meaningful—a mark, a single color, a blank, scraping?”

The artist will give a free, online public talk via Zoom on Thursday, November 16, 7-8pm EST. He will also lead an in-person exhibition walk-through on Saturday, November 18, 3pm. Masks are suggested for the health of all guests.

ABOUT THE ARTIST
Michael Brennan (b. 1965, Pine Island, FL; lives Brooklyn, NY) has exhibited his paintings and works on paper nationally and internationally for the past three decades, including in the United States, Mexico, Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, China, Australia, and New Zealand. 

Here at the gallery, he previously mounted three very well-received solo exhibitions – Late Spring (2018), Grey Razor Paintings (2014), and Knife Paintings (2006) – and has participated in numerous group exhibitions including our major survey exhibition MINUS SPACE at MoMA PS1 in 2008-2009 and Twenty (2023).

Brennan’s work have been reviewed in publications including The New York Times, Art in America, ARTnews, Art New England, The Brooklyn Rail, ArtNet Magazine, NY Arts, and Philadelphia Inquirer. He is also an accomplished arts writer, and his reviews and essays have been published in The Brooklyn Rail, ArtNet Magazine, Two Coats of Paint, The Village Voice, The Architect’s Newspaper, American Abstract Artists, and Archives of American Art/Smithsonian Institution, as well as in numerous exhibition catalogues.

Brennan’s work is included in collections such as the Baltimore Museum of Art, National Gallery of Art, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Jose Museum of Art, American Express, General Dynamics, Daimler AG, and Sony Corporation. He holds an MFA in Painting and an MS in Art History from Pratt Institute and a BA in Classics from the University of Florida. He has taught at Pratt Institute since 1998 and is currently Adjunct Professor in the Fine Arts Department. He has also previously taught at the School of Visual Arts, Hunter College, and Cooper Union (all NYC).

ABOUT MINUS SPACE
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