Anne Brenner's paintings, often depicting young adults, go beyond traditional portraiture. Her figures are cast into floral landscapes, nestled in the lush and welcoming spaces of artificial paradises, where life, suddenly, is freed of its weight, its burdens, and its existential anxieties.
For the contemporary artist, creating images of the human body that defy realism makes perfect sense in light of this story. Realism has the drawback of constraining the imagination, limiting it, or even outright prohibiting it. In doing so, it interrupts the mental process that propels thought beyond reality and its finite signs. The artist, on the contrary, embraces the infinity of possibilities. He creates worlds, representing himself in a form of his own creation – an emanation of his mind, his vision, his Weltanschauung, his personal and singular “representation of the world,” to use the terms of the 19th-century idealist philosophers.
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