Darcy Brenna (b.1998,UK) paints with urgency and tenderness. Paint swells and moves like music, propelled by bodily movement and somatic memory. Brenna brings figures to the surface, finding fragmented forms in her initial marks. She then pulls them apart, burying, concealing and blurring them in layers of paint. Figures appear to form and rearrange, ambiguous to whether they’re becoming or depleting. This process alludes to ritual and suggests a cyclical nature of death and rebirth. Grounded in the body, eruptions coalesce in unearthly forms, mirroring tension in the body. Brenna doesn’t wish to present the body as something complete. She describes the body as ‘fluid, mortal and vulnerable to transformation’. The canvas acts as a space for the subliminal to gather and a vessel where paint is pushed to act as carnal and alive.
Brenna was selected in 2023 by Tracey Emin to take part in the first cohort of the Tracey Emin Artist Residency in Margate. Since graduating from T.E.A.R in September 2024, her work has been exhibited in New York, Amsterdam, London, Los Angeles and Margate. Her work has recently been presented at international Art Fairs including UNTITLED Miami and Art Rotterdam..
EDUCATION
Tracey Emin Artist Residency – 2023/2024
First Class BA (Hons) Fine Art UCA – 2021
Distinction Grade Integrated foundation UCA – 2018
ART FAIRS
Art Rotterdam – 2025
Untitled Miami – 2025
SELECTED COLLECTIONS
Firestorm Foundation | Stockholm
AMOCA | Wales
Museu Inima De Paula | Brazil
SELECTED EXHIBITIONS
2026
‘Surfaces’ | Albertz Benda- New York | USA More Info
New Voices from the Museum Collection’ | AMOCA-Wales | UK More info
2025
‘Modèle Vivant” | Jack Siebert Projects -Beverly Hills, California | USA More Info
‘International Women’s Day Auction’ X ‘Art on a Postcard’ |The Bomb Factory- London | UK More info
‘All Fours’ | Homecoming Gallery-Amsterdam -NL More info
‘Royal Academy Summer Exhibition’ | The Royal Academy- London | UK More info
2024
‘The Seahorse Versus the Axe‘ | Liliya Gallery – London | UK
‘I Am Rooted, But I Flow’ | MEY gallery x Maison Lune – Los Angeles | USA More info
‘Works on paper’ | Quench Gallery-Margate | UK More info
‘T..E.A.R.S The Final Show | TKE studios – Margate | UK More info
2023
‘TEARS’ interim residency show | TKE studios – Margate | UK More info
‘Limbs, Lungs, Lovers’ Solo Show | Ramsay and Williams – Margate | UK
Artist Essay by Emilie Trice
For UNTITLED MIAMI presented by Anna Erickson
Oscillating between moments of stillness and unbridled emotion, Darcy Brenna’s abstract works expose dichotomies within the human condition. She captures extreme states of being in gestures that intimate the cyclical stages of existence, wrought in a rich palette of deep reds, violets, corals, and marine blues. Brenna’s compositions erupt and swell, invoking fury and passion, defiance and strength. This surface tension is balanced by underlying traces of brushstrokes, left semi-visible by the artist — a record of becoming that suggests the cumulative effects of life itself.
Fleshy, bodily forms and contrasting tonalities collide in shapes reminiscent of tempests and turbulent seas, revealing the brutality and beauty inherent to nature and its oppositional forces. Just as the seasons initiate perpetual shifts between violence and tenderness — from the bleak frigidity of winter to the exuberant rebirth of spring — Brenna articulates the messy, poetic struggle that defines the very impulse to survive.
Brenna’s work is objectively visceral, propelled by her own emotional instincts and somatic memory. Her artistic process veers from combative to contemplative and back again, like a pendulum swinging between antipodes. Each painting is thus an act of reconciliation, bringing these binaries into harmony through color, form, and spatial synthesis. Layers upon layers of paint, along with lines of poetry, drawings, and other visual fragments, are applied and then obscured, destroyed or concealed, resulting in a sense of depth achieved only via trial and error, surrender and rejection, triumph and resolution, those variables which, in the aggregate, constitute the complexity of lived experience.
Born in UK, in 1998, Darcy Brenna lives and works in Leeds, UK. She received a First Class BA in Fine Art from the University for the Creative Arts in Canterbury. Darcy was an Artist in Residence at the Tracey Emin Artist Residency for eighteen months in 2023-2024. Her work has been exhibited in London, Margate, Amsterdam, Rotterdam, and Los Angeles..
DARCY BRENNA 