ABOUT
Ivana Brenner is a Buenos Aires-born, Brooklyn-based artist.
Her work has been part of international biennials such as Bronx Calling: The Sixth Bronx Museum AIM Biennial, at the Bronx Museum of the Arts, NYC (2024) and Work and Worth, at the Biennale Internationale du Lin de Portneuf, Québec (2015).
She has exhibited individually at Galería Vasari, Buenos Aires (Towards Dissolution, 2015), and Alejandra Von Hartz Gallery, Miami (Urpflanze, 2011). She has participated in several international group and two-person gallery and museum shows, amongst which The Argentina International I, at The Slip Gallery, NYC (2025); Contemporary Clay: Seven new voices in American Ceramics, at Emma Scully Gallery, NYC (2023); Sólo 7 Ceramistas, Galería Vasari Buenos Aires (2023); A su lado, at Galería Vasari, Buenos Aires (2019); Le Dégel, at Julio Artist-Run Space, Paris (2017); My Feet Have Lost Memory of Softness, at The Franklin, Chicago, curated by Ionit Behar (2016); Assemblage #1, at Galerie 0fr, Paris (2016); Romántico, at Fundación PROA, Buenos Aires (2014), and Material Color at Hunterdon Art Museum, New Jersey (2008). Brenner was a 2022 Bronx Museum AIM fellow and was part of NYFA's 2020 Immigrant Artist Mentoring Program, where she also served as a mentor in 2024 and 2025. In 2015 she was given a two-week residency to complete her site-specific work for the Biennale Internationale du Lin de Portneuf, Québec. She was awarded by the City of Paris a 6-month residency at Cité Internationale des Arts, Paris (2009-2010). She earned her MFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago with a merit-based full scholarship.
Brenner was a 2022 Bronx Museum AIM fellow and was part of NYFA's 2020 Immigrant Artist Mentoring Program, where she also served as a mentor in 2024 and 2025. In 2015 she was given a two-week residency to complete her site-specific work for the Biennale Internationale du Lin de Portneuf, Québec. She was awarded by the City of Paris a 6-month residency at Cité Internationale des Arts, Paris (2009-2010). She earned her MFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago with a merit-based full scholarship.
She earned her MFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago with a merit-based full scholarship.
STATEMENT
I make sculptures that are abstract yet bodily and sensual. My practice is intuitive and process-based, involving material research focused on clay and paint skins. I develop my own techniques to create non-human bodies that evoke fleshiness, body fluids, and fertility in an attempt to give anima to inert matter. I am fascinated by the transformational aspects of materials. I prepare paint patches that I lay to dry, and when they are still soft and flexible I extend them, skin-like, on cold stoneware bodies. Other times I hang these skins from rods, giving a brutal aspect to an otherwise delicate materiality. In my ceramics I create dissonance and flirt with the abject by contrasting precious materials like gold with masses of brute, humble, mud-appearing clay. When I work on site-specific installations I treat buildings as bodies that host an organism growing out of them. In these projects I take over walls, staircases, nooks and floors, playing with the construction’s own accidents - such as cracks and signs of decay- and making sterile architecture feel alive. Like life, love is generative: it creates something where nothing existed before. Skins, fluids and other sensual expressions in my pieces reflect the tactile process of how they’re made and reconnect us with pleasure and emotions. As a South American immigrant I affirm through my work the value of connecting to our bodies and hearts as an act of resistance.