Biography

Brenton John Drechsler (he/him) is an Australian emerging visual artist. He was born in Campbelltown, South Australia on Kaurna Country in December of 1981. He spent his childhood in Holden Hill, South Australia. Drechsler studied at TAFE SA, from 2006 to 2010 and completed an Advanced Diploma in Fashion Design and Technology. In his graduating year he won the 2010 TAFE SA Student of the Year award and a financial scholarship to participate in industry events in Hong Kong in 2011. Drechsler was self-employed as a fashion designer until 2015. From 2015 to 2020 he was employed as cabin crew for one of Australia's leading airlines. Drechsler commenced his Bachelor of Visual Arts at Adelaide Central School of Art in 2018. He completed this in 2022. In 2023, Drechsler completed an Honours year at Adelaide Central School of Art achieving a First Class result. 

 

Drechsler is an emerging visual artist whose practice explores ideas around opacity, personal narrative, and orientation through the lens of his queer subjectivity. He also explores the absence of belonging to place. Through a vigorous practice of painting, editing and reflection, Drechsler has considered the link between his sense of self and the materiality of paint. He explores his themes with a variety of consistent motifs like foreign urban environments, garments and career-based iconography. Multiplicities, repetitions, and dualities are all tropes in Drechsler’s work, evoking the back-and-forth nature of being queer. An ever present, non-human alter ego emerges in the form of a green and white stripe which binds Drechsler's work together, present in each composition.