Jean Brenner was a painter

Painting

Painting is the practice of applying paint, pigment, color or other medium to a surface . The application of the medium is commonly applied to the base with a brush but other objects can be used. In art, the term painting describes both the act and the result of the action. However, painting is...

 from Mulhouse

Mulhouse

Mulhouse |mill]] hamlet) is a city and commune in eastern France, close to the Swiss and German borders. With a population of 110,514 and 278,206 inhabitants in the metropolitan area in 2006, it is the largest city in the Haut-Rhin département, and the second largest in the Alsace region after...

, France

France

The French Republic , The French Republic , The French Republic , (commonly known as France , is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France...

.

Life and work

Brenner came from an artist family from Alsace; his father Joseph was the professor of textile drawings. In 1956, Jean Brenner began his studies at the Ecole municipale des Beaux Arts. From 1960 to 1962, he traveled in North Africa. In 1964, he studied at the Ecole des Arts Décoratifs in Strasbourg. Brenner became an art teacher at that school, before he dedicated himself to intensive studio work to prepare his first international exhibition. His work was shown in 1971 in New York City (twice) and Berlin. He received the Palme d'Or des Beaux Arts in Monte-Carlo in 1972 and exhibited in Rome.

Since then, many further exhibitions and honours have followed. He had his first exhibition and retrospective in his hometown of Mulhouse in the Musée des Beaux Arts in the Villa Steinbach in autumn of 2008.

Brenner's media is very diverse, including techniques such as engraving

Engraving

Engraving is the practice of incising a design on to a hard, usually flat surface, by cutting grooves into it. The result may be a decorated object in itself, as when silver, gold, steel, or glass are engraved, or may provide an intaglio printing plate, of copper or another metal, for printing...

, lithography

Lithography

Lithography is a method for printing using a stone or a metal plate with a completely smooth surface...

, collage

Collage

A collage is a work of formal art, primarily in the visual arts, made from an assemblage of different forms, thus creating a new whole....

 and photography

Photography

Photography is the art, science and practice of creating durable images by recording light or other electromagnetic radiation, either electronically by means of an image sensor or chemically by means of a light-sensitive material such as photographic film...

. His paintings range from still-lifes with flowers and full landscapes to abstract portraits

Abstract art

Abstract art uses a visual language of form, color and line to create a composition which may exist with a degree of independence from visual references in the world. Western art had been, from the Renaissance up to the middle of the 19th century, underpinned by the logic of perspective and an...

 in black and white. Some of his works reference Cézanne and Monet. He spoke fluent French, German, English and his native Alsatian.

Jean Brenner died on February 2009.

External links

• Info-Culture.net | Retrospektive Jean Brenner, 2008-11-10