London/ St. Martin’s
Stockwell Depot
Brochure for inaugural Stockwell Depot Group show, 1968, and reviews.
Radioville
His public sculpture Radioville, a re-working of his earlier sculptures Endsville and Capital Z, was installed in 2005 at Radio City, a condominium development built on the site of the old CBC radio-antenna tower in downtown Toronto.
PHOTOS OF RADIOVILLE BY CRAIG JAMES WHITE:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/castelmar/sets/72057594105027396/
Swinger
Critic Gary Michael Dault revisits Swinger with Toronto gallery owner Olga Korper in a lively discussion.
http://artcondos.ca/blog/2012/08/13/art-we-love-roland-breners-swinger/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nz3JhQ-J8xY
Swinger was originally shown at Deitch Projects in NYC in 2000 consisting of 3 Swingers:
Obituaries & Memorials
GLOBE & MAIL OBITUARY:
ROLAND BRENER, ARTIST 1942-2006
Sculptor who left his native South Africa became known in British Columbia for producing eccentric art that has now taken its place in the arc of contemporary sculpture
by SARAH MILROY
‘He was a person to whom extraordinary things happened.” This is how his old friend and fellow artist Mowry Baden describes sculptor Roland Brener.
Mr. Baden has a point. How many people can claim such a trajectory? Born into a Russian-Jewish immigrant family in South Africa (he never shook the accent, and claimed the black, improvised street-art of his hometown as a lifelong inspiration), he lost his father at 6, was raised in the ambience of anti-apartheid activism, skipped out on the South African draft to serve instead as a paratrooper in the Israeli army in the late 1950s, and then parachuted himself into the London art world in 1963. There he studied sculpture at the knee of one of the masters of 20th-century art, Anthony Caro, at St. Martin’s School of Art, where he became a star pupil, if a notoriously unruly one. After several more moves, he landed in Victoria in the mid-1970s, where he settled into a life of teaching and making art.
At the University of Victoria, he became one of the most influential art teachers in the country, numbering among his students Canadian artists James Carl and Allan Storey, as well as the leading American sculptor Charles Ray.
While Mr. Brener, under Mr. Caro, mastered the rigorous language of formalist abstract sculpture, he was quick to rebel. His career can be understood as a long struggle between his love of the well-balanced and considered-modernist object (pure of extraneous detail, unnecessary flourishes, entirely non-representation, candid about its own materiality), and his postmodernist tendencies, which allowed him to invite into his art found objects, humour, personal revelation, and a certain weird and wonderful creatureliness, a cobbled-together eclecticism that harked back to the beloved folk art of his African childhood. With one foot on either side of the modern/postmodern divide, Roland Brener’s career presents a fascinating case study in two rival traditions of sculpture, locked in a sweaty embrace.
Mr. Brener’s earliest mature pieces in London demonstrated his devotion to Mr. Caro’s modernist ideals. Works like Single Bow Sculpture (1966) and Sculpture with a Single Arch (1968), which he exhibited at Stockwell Depot (an alternative space that he initiated along with other artists from St. Martin’s), show the artist exploring the tensile qualities of curved metal in large-scale inventions that subtly evoked architectural forms, like archways and colonnades. But even these distant architectural echoes of the visible world were too much for Mr. Caro, who insisted on complete abstraction. Mr. Brener struggled to conform, but finally he snapped, hoisting the middle finger with a pivotal sculpture titled Rod and Wire Sculpture with Suspended Objects (1969), a crazy, nest-like configuration of curving metal struts, to which he affixed cheap, painted, plaster flying-duck ornaments salvaged from a relative’s house. (The work is on view, until Sunday, at the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria).
“They [the ducks] were flat and white on one side and coloured and volumetric on the other,” he said earlier this year. “In a way, I suppose it was a send-up of Caro’s idea that sculpture was to be observed from all sides — that you had to compose the different views. When Caro saw it, he muttered under his breath. He talked about how absurd this thing was.”
Ever the rebel, Mr. Brener took flight — first to California for a spell at the University of California at Santa Barbara (where his met his wife, Dama Hanks), then to the University of Iowa, and finally to Victoria, where he could make art in the freedom of relative obscurity. More important still, he was close to the ocean, because his other great guiding passion in life was sailing. They were, for him, twinned pursuits, adventures in risk taking that involved a delicate balancing act between discipline and abandon. (He once sailed from Victoria to Tahiti with his wife and their daughter, Amy, who was then 4.)
As the years progressed, Mr. Brener’s sculptural language began to shift, involving ever more outrageous forays into representation and personal revelation. There were scale models of his beloved racing ships (like Earl of Gnosis and Victor Yankee, both made in 1995). There were his computer-designed Swingers — large, pastel-coloured Humpty Dumpty characters who sat on swings in the gallery and smiled their idiot smiles. There were genies emerging from bottles. There were a number of robot-like works, like Dogs of Digital (two canines made out of raku clay slabs set on hinges). There was Sweeper (an elegantly jointed, serpentine creation that moved its limbs parallel to the floor in unpredictable arcs), and Small Talk (shown at the Venice Biennale in 1987, when he represented Canada), a viewer-activated, standing audio-sculpture with a face that speaks phrases that Mr. Brener borrowed from his correspondence with debt collectors.
The voice used for the recording is that of his Toronto dealer, Olga Korper, who this week recalled his insatiable playfulness.
“There was always a sense of a dance,” Ms. Korper says, “of an endlessly inventive child playing with his toys. He was very interested in the world around him, particularly in the goofy little things. He didn’t look for good taste and he didn’t look for grandeur. He could get extraordinarily excited about a trip to Active Surplus [a hardware store on Toronto’s Queen Street West] or Radio Shack. All those gismos!”
Bruce Ferguson, newly appointed director of programming at the Art Gallery of Ontario, says there is another aspect of Roland Brener’s life that needs to be underscored: his commitment to teaching. “I think he held it to be one of the most important responsibilities of the artist.”
The legacy is a rich one, Mr. Ferguson says. Careful consideration of the student’s work, and the articulation of that process, was paramount.
“When Caro would hold up your work as an example to other students — that was very powerful for me,” Mr. Brener said earlier this year, recalling his own student days. “And he taught me how to look. It was very contemplative — almost like a spiritual practice. He would lead us around the work, and encourage comments. The sculpture sat in the world, like a person.”
Mr. Brener, by all accounts, followed Mr. Caro’s lead.
Though he supported his students, the going could get pretty tough. Charles Ray, arguably Mr. Brener’s most celebrated pupil, and who studied with him both at University of Iowa and at the University of Victoria, recalls, with admiration: “In a certain sense, Roland is a predator. He has always had that ability to spot a weakness. At times that was painful, but it was also very helpful.”
Coupled with this, however, was a vivid enthusiasm and fearlessness, which Mr. Brener expressed in the studio, in the classroom and beyond. His wife recalls a wild night five years ago when the couple and their daughter found themselves sailing in some heavy weather off the coast of Nicaragua. “A wind was blowing — they call it a Papagallos wind — gusting to about 50,” she said, “and it was getting pretty dark. A perfectly clear night. We were heeled right over, about 45 degrees, when a spreader broke on the mast. It started flailing around, ripping our sail. A fishing line had become tangled around our propeller, so we couldn’t use the engine. Roland realized we were in trouble, that we could end up 250 miles offshore, and he just climbed up the mast. No,” she corrected herself, with a laugh, “he ran up the mast, and he then started trying to fit the spreader back on. It was very impulsive. He was up there, being bashed about, hanging on to the mast. He was absolutely such a problem solver, always so self-sufficient. He was going to fix it himself and he was going to save his family. It was very brave.”
“In the end,” she said, “he couldn’t fit it back on. It was impossible to do. We had to call for the Nicaraguan coast guard to come and get us. But, you know, he almost did.”
Roland Brener was born in Johannesburg on Feb. 22, 1942. He died in Victoria on March 22, 2006, of pneumonia after an on-again, off-again battle with lymphoma. He is survived by his wife and daughter.
VICTORIA TIMES-COLONIST OBITUARY
Roland Brener taught a generation of artists at the University of Victoria and left a legacy of quirky and thought-provoking sculptures in major galleries throughout this country. He died in Victoria on Wednesday at age 64.
Brener’s constantly evolving sculptural practice took his reputation worldwide. He was Canada’s delegate to the Venice Biennale in 1988, and is significantly represented in the leading galleries of Canada. With colleague Mowry Baden, Brener’s work is currently the subject of a two-person show of sculpture at the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria.
Brener was born in South Africa in 1942 and later served in the Israeli armed forces. From 1963 to 1966 he studied at St. Martin’s School of Art in London with noted British sculptor Anthony Caro. Though Caro was dedicated to a totally abstract modernism, he took his students to study the Parthenon Frieze at the British Museum.
According to Brener, his whole training was figurative at its basis. Brener was also intrigued by materials that carry their own cultural connotations. He felt no particular allegiance to any school.
“I’m loose enough now,” he commented, “not aligned with modernism or any other -ism. I am letting go.”
Accepting a professorship at the University of Victoria, Brener moved here in 1972 and came to influence a generation of students before his retirement in 2000. Working with “off the shelf” materials like little electric motors, speakers and lights, he created a form of assembled sculpture called “bricolage,” the sort of thing a home handyman might put together.
Brener was Canada’s delegate to the Venice Biennale in 1988, where he made a big hit with an animated sculpture made from a robotic Teddy Ruxpin doll. Originally, the plush toy rolled its eyes and moved its mouth while a tape played. Brener skinned the bear, revealing a mechanical biomorph, and gave it a new voice. The Art Gallery of Greater Victoria owns this arresting sculpture.
A dedicated and skilful sailor, Brener arranged to have famed Sidney boatbuilder Bent Jespersen create a fleet of three Mini-12s in 1995. These are modelled on 12-metre ocean racers, but are just four metres long. One, called Passage, was cut along the “waterline” and appears to be sailing briskly across the gallery floor. Another, called The Earl of Gnosis, is a body-sized cabin lined with starry upholstery. The reference to ship-burials is intentional. On the occasion of their presentation to the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria, Brener’s bald head was indicative of a recent chemotherapy treatment for a tumour on his brain.
After overcoming that cancer, Brener, with his wife Dama, took his proper sailboat, Reality, out for a two-year cruise. “During the time I was living on my boat, and my computer was my laboratory,” Brener told me later. He began to design his sculptures on the screen and arranged for their fabrication by others. Often they were figurative, and Brener was soon hand-painting doll-sized models of himself as a naked seven-year-old.
“You can do that stuff when you’re older,” Brener averred. “My vanity has diminished to the point where I can deal with myself without looking like a movie star or a hero. I never know what’s taboo.”
Grant Watson, a former student of Brener’s, fabricated Brener’s ideas for some years. With another Brener student, Yoko Takashima, they created a large commissioned sculpture for a plaza next to Toronto’s National Ballet School in 2004. Looking down from the neighbouring office towers, you see a cluster of 59 little stainless steel houses, illuminated from within. It’s a bit like a lilliputian suburb at night. A similar installation, Capital Z, was installed at (and subsequently purchased by) Canada’s National Gallery.
Other Brener creations have been purchased by the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Musee d’Art Contemporain of Montreal and Canada Council Art Bank. While his main dealer is Olga Korper in Toronto, Brener’s work has been exhibited in England, Japan and the United States.
The current exhibition at the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria (until April 16) features work on a personal scale. Dama told me “he really made a big point to get back into hands-on work.” It’s modest, quirky and always at play with the materials. She noted that his new work is, in retrospect, suffused with “so much reference to mortality — and immortality.”
The joyous flourishing of his sculpture over the last few years, and its recognition with the current show at the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria, were an appropriate final phase for this well-loved artist. Brener’s end came swiftly when the tumour returned. Surrounded by his family during his last month, he enjoyed walks to Bubby Rosa’s cafe in the Cook Street Village near his home to “chow down” almost to the last.
Roland Brener is survived by his wife and daughter Amy.
Obituary of Roland Brener: 1942-2006
© Times Colonist (Victoria) 2006
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REVIEW OF LAST SHOW AT OLGA KORPER GALLERY BY GARY MICHAEL DAULT WITH TRIBUTE:
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/arts/a-madcap-tragic-farewell/article729757/
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