Stripes 5 (Alternative Views)

In early August, Michael Reid Northern Beaches will present our first solo exhibition from contemporary painter Brenton Drechsler — a rising art star and two-time National Emerging Art Prize finalist who has followed up his NEAP success with two acclaimed solo shows at our Southern Highlands gallery.

Titled Stripes 5 (Alternative Views), Drechsler’s forthcoming exhibition offers a fresh window into his distinctive, psychologically rich interior scenes and streetscapes — quiet, observational, colour-soaked works filtered through a queer and deeply personal lens.

Born on Kaurna Country in Campbelltown, South Australia, Drechsler draws on his personal history to build paintings that balance stillness with vibrancy and visual complexity. Each composition feels paused in motion — a lingering moment of ambiguity and reflection. Cars sit parked, interiors hum with memory, and built environments become vessels for mood and meaning. His approach to surface, gesture and layering produces canvases that are atmospheric and unguarded, inviting open interpretation.

“I’m interested in how paint can create a sense of dislocation or opacity,” says Drechsler, who began his creative career in fashion design before turning to visual art, attaining a Bachelor of Visual Art (Honours) at Adelaide Central School of Art and winning the Hill Smith Art Advisory Award. “The cars and interiors feel familiar but distanced — spaces that carry emotional meaning but remain out of reach.”

A recurring motif throughout Drechsler’s work is his green-and-white stripe — a graphic, sometimes partially hidden proxy for the artist himself. “It’s a kind of non-human alter ego,” he explains in a profile published by Belle magazine alongside his Southern Highlands solo debut. The stripe serves as both a painterly signature and a metaphor for queer experience — visible yet obscured; by turns exuberant or discreet.

While autobiographical in tone, Drechsler’s paintings resist overt confession. His use of layered oil paint, blurred detail and oblique subject matter lends the work an open-ended quality, prompting viewers to enter with their own associations and memories. The stripes becomes a stand-in for that subjectivity — a subtle presence in a staged world of paused motion and shifting emotional weather.

To discuss works from the series, please email northernbeaches@michaelreid.com.au