Albert Brenner
About Albert Brenner:
Sculpture and painting…two of Albert Brenner’s creative passions developed while he was an art student at The New York School of Industrial Arts, and have continued throughout his life and career. He was either sketching or creating tiny sculptures from beeswax. “The material was easy to carry around and work on, and it only cost a few pennies.”
Fail Safe marked Mr. Brenner’s first full-length feature film design credit. While still working on this first film, he was hired for a second, and then a third and a fourth…Now forty films and five Academy Award nominations later (The Sunshine Boys, The Goodbye Girl, The Turning Point, 2010, and Beaches), Albert Brenner is devoting all his energies to painting and sculpting.
As a scenic designer, Mr. Brenner designed and painted backdrops for theater and television. As a production designer, he designed and rendered countless interiors and set sketches for his films. In his spare time, he began painting “for himself” in watercolors and oils, began sculpting, and has never stopped.
His first serious sculpture was created in 1968 during the film shoot of Monte Walsh. At a powerful moment in the film, the lead actor stands over his fallen horse waiting for the animal to rise. The horse and rider, which he sculpted in wax on the set, was later cast in bronze on his return to Los Angeles. Since then, Mr. Brenner has created a wide body of work. While Mr. Brenner’s sculptures are generally in bronze ultimately, using the lost wax process, he also creates pieces in both terra cotta and resin, giving both the artist and the collector some flexibility of choice. This choice is especially true in his commissioned portraiture.
While Mr. Brenner’s paintings are mostly still lifes, he also enjoys figurative work, which reflects in his sculpture as well. Mr. Brenner believes that his art, as his production design, is but one of the many of his life’s voices. Through the particular temperament of this voice, Mr. Brenner is striving to create an environment in which the viewer can see further than the material to discover that which struck his artistic sensibilities at the moment he observed and sculpted or painted his subject. He believes that the search for truth and beauty lies not in slavishly reproducing reality, but in interpreting that which nature provides.
A signature member of the California Art Club, and an associate member of the National Sculpture Society, Mr. Brenner twice won first place at the CAC Annual Gold Medal Exhibition, and has been exhibited at the Palm Springs Desert Museum, the Carnegie Art Museum and the National Sculpture Society, as well as galleries in Laguna Beach, CA, Scottsdale, AZ and Lambertville, NJ.
Visit Albert’s website at:
Full feature film credits available at: www.imdb.com
