Brenton Drechsler
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Brenton Drechsler (he/him) is an Australian, emerging, contemporary visual artist. He was born in Campbelltown, South Australia on Kaurna Country. He has German and English, settler colonial ancestry. Brenton studied at TAFE SA, from 2006 to 2010 and completed an Advanced Diploma in Fashion Design and Technology. In his graduating year he won 2010 TAFE SA Student of the Year and a financial scholarship to participate in industry events in Hong Kong in 2011. Brenton commenced his Bachelor of Visual Arts at Adelaide Central School of Art in 2018, graduating in 2022, winning the Hill Smith Art Advisory Award for painting in December of that year. In 2023, Brenton completed an Honours year at Adelaide Central School of Art achieving a First Class result.
Brenton is an emerging visual artist whose practice explores notions of orientation, personal narrative and opacity through the subjective lens of his queer identity. He also explores the absence of belonging to place and finding his bearings in paint. Brenton investigates these themes through a variety of consistent motifs, like stripes, garments, foreign urban environments and vintage cars. His research, writing and painterly methods have focused on subversion and distortion, in relation to Australian heteronormative culture. His practice also explores the right to opacity in contemporary visual art.