BIO & CURRENT EXHIBITIONS

Barbara Brenner makes work about what light does just before you can name it.

Her encaustic paintings—built from molten beeswax, pigment, and heat on birch panel—are meditative and precise, their surfaces simultaneously dense and translucent. The series she has developed over more than a decade (Clouds, Dream, World, Evolution, Imagination) move between abstraction and atmosphere, evoking states more than subjects: the quality of a morning sky, the weight of a dream half-remembered, the stillness that follows a storm.

Brenner came to her studio practice after nearly three decades at Coca-Cola USA in Atlanta, where she built a career in marketing and advertising. The pivot was complete and deliberate. "Above all, my work has movement," she has said, "yet my images are strangely peaceful. I have finally found a private sphere away from public chaos." That tension—between the restless and the still, the structured and the dissolving—runs through everything she makes.

Her newest series marks an expansion into fine art photography. Shot close and printed large on face-mounted pearlescent archival substrate, these works transform the surfaces of water and light into something that reads as much as painting as photograph. Each edition is strictly limited. The pearlescent finish—luminous and dimensional—is integral to the work, not decorative: it behaves the way wax does, catching and releasing light depending on where you stand.

Her childhood was defined by constant relocation, more than forty moves. That early life of improvisation and instability found its counterweight, eventually, in the studio: in the deliberate, material, irreversible act of fusing wax to panel. Her work has been exhibited in solo and group shows in Atlanta, Brooklyn, and San Francisco, and is held in private and corporate collections throughout the United States and abroad.

SELECTED PAST EXHIBITIONS

SOLO EXHIBITIONS

2018 — A Time — A Place | Hathaway Contemporary | Atlanta, GA
2014 — Les Splendeurs des Trois Reines | Bill Lowe Gallery | Atlanta, GA
2012 — Unravel the Mystery | Bill Lowe Gallery | Atlanta, GA

ART FAIRS

2026 — Water . Earth . Illusion San Francisco Art Fair | Fort Mason Festival Pavilion | San Francisco, CA
2025 — When Trees Dream of Water | Atlanta Art Fair, Artfully Branded Curatorial | Atlanta, GA
2024 — The Sky Above — The Earth Below | Atlanta Art Fair, M.David Gallery | Atlanta, GA

GROUP

2018 — David & Schweitzer | Brooklyn, NY
2016 — Community | Hathaway Contemporary | Atlanta, GA
2016 — All Tomorrow's Parties | Hathaway Contemporary | Atlanta, GA
2014 — A Cast of Twenty-One Artists | Bill Lowe Gallery | Atlanta, GA
2012 — ArtCan | Bill Lowe Gallery | Atlanta, GA
2011 — The Irascible Muse | Bill Lowe Gallery | Atlanta, GA
2011 — The Eloquence of Trees | Bill Lowe Gallery | Atlanta, GA
2010 — FolkFest | Southeastern Encaustics Association | Atlanta, GA
2010 — Heaven + Earth | SEA Group Exhibition | Atlanta, GA
2009 — The Stacks | Atlanta, GA
2009 — Encaustics 13 | Jack Gallery | Atlanta, GA
2009 — Atlanta Artists Center Sixth Annual Juried Art Exhibit | Atlanta, GA

Work held in private and corporate collections throughout the United States and internationally.

PRESS
Artsy — "In Encaustic Works, Barbara Brenner Transforms Chaos into Calm"