Nellien Brewer -Don’t Take it for Granted

Nellien Brewer – Artist Statement

‘Sirrah, your father’s dead; and what will you do now? How will you live?’

‘As birds do, mother.’

 In a world dominated by the artificial, a pandemic of stress and anxiety plagues ever younger patients. Loneliness increases as ‘friend’ lists grow.  Traditional values are discarded in favour of new configurations whilst modern man escapes into the perfection  offered by a virtual world.

We would do well to heed Shakespeare.

 Nellien Brewer was born in Greytown, KwaZulu-Natal, in 1961. She qualified as a Landscape Architect from the University of Pretoria in 1982 and spent the next 20 years in this profession. Fine arts, however, always remained her first love, and she enrolled for the BVA degree at UNISA which she completed in 2011. She employs a variety of media in her art making, and she started working extensively with text during 2007. Her work has since become increasingly computer based as digital drawing facilitates a level of detail impossible to achieve by hand.

 In 2008 she was one of the ‘Top 15’ artists at the Ekurhuleni National Fine Arts Awards. The following year she received the ‘Art on Paper’ merit award at the 2009 Thami Mnyele Fine Arts Awards. Since then, she has participated in a number of juried group exhibitions both nationally and internationally – the most recent being the 2022 Graphica Creativa Triennial at Jyväskylä Art Museum, Finland and the London Art Biennale 2023. One of her works was exhibited at the 2024 LA Art Show as part of the Effetto Arte Fondazione show in the European Pavilion. In 2023 she received joint first prize with Wisdom Chitembetembe at the Vuleka Art Awards, and her work is represented by Espace Vision’Art gallery in Paris.

 She is a member of The Printing Girls, and loves to experiment with hand-printing methods combined with digital printing.