SALTWORKS is pleased to present Atlanta-based artist, Craig Drennen's first solo exhibition at the gallery. Continuing his exploration of overlooked and unknown cultural contributions, Drennen's latest subject is Shakespeare's Timon of Athens. For this exhibition Drennen has created new paintings, works on paper and a performance. Timon of Athens is Shakespeare's most challenging and obscure play. It was unfinished and never performed in his lifetime and is generally free of critical analysis and deterministic theories. Accordin... Read more

SALTWORKS is pleased to present Atlanta-based artist, Craig Drennen’s first solo exhibition at the gallery. Continuing his exploration of overlooked and unknown cultural contributions, Drennen’s latest subject is Shakespeare’s Timon of Athens. For this exhibition Drennen has created new paintings, works on paper and a performance.

Timon of Athens is Shakespeare’s most challenging and obscure play. It was unfinished and never performed in his lifetime and is generally free of critical analysis and deterministic theories. According to Drennen, this lack of history and public perception provides an open stage onto which he projects his subjectivity.

Utilizing a bottom up approach, Drennen works through the play’s dramatis personæ, using contemporary associations to depict each character individually, then eventually in combination. The process is similar to the evolution of a language as it begins simply, then moves toward greater complexity. Iteration and nuance can be seen in four works on paper in this exhibition—each titled after the character Painter—featuring a large scrawled ‘X’ in the center, overlayed with a polka dot pattern borrowed from a woman’s skirt, and a hyper-realistic rendering of a Polaroid.

Sustained viewing of Drennen’s work reveals subtle differences in composition and palette spread across a broad spectrum of painterly effects. This verisimilitude alludes to an actor’s craft and the use of trompe l’oeil, gestural marks, and hard-edge abstraction is less about pastiche and more about allowing the physical material of paint to perform as many tasks as possible. Drennen states that"…’Painting as acting’ is more important in that I’m making the paint become many different things".