Primavera catalogue text by curtator  
Robert Cook

I’d never met Brendan before but he was the first name I mentioned to MCA Chief Curator Rachel Kent when she brought up the idea of doing this show. I knew I was meeting Rachel to discuss Primavera 2013 (as a fain possibility) and had already checked Brendan’s birth date to ensure he was young enough for inclusion. What I’ve loved about his work for a while is its humour, dorky grace, sheer moving beauty and will to melancholicall delightful pleasure. And what I also liked was that I felt that, somewhere in his faces and forms, was a extension of Australian expressionism retuned into a glandular take on global modernism. In my first plan of the show I drew a massive – maybe five-metre-wide – version of one of his sculptural heads to secure his spot. I wanted his serious lightness to be a pol for this show, and the way his expressionism was tune to a blankness seemed to effect a hollow that matched the void of the gallery somehow.