Press Release



 

Galerie Richard in New York presents for the first time a solo show by Alex Brown entitled 2005 – 2012 from February 11 to March 18. The exhibition focuses on major works from 2005 to 2012. Feature Inc. in New York had exhibited Alex brown since 1998. He was part of the Post-Digital Painting exhibition at the Cranbrook Art Museum in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, the first museum show dedicated to the emergence of digital painting.

 

 “With systematic rigor, Alex brown reconstitutes images through an abstracting procedure of modulation. Using banal photographs culled from disparate sources such as brochures, magazines and websites, Brown sublimates the images into a standard schematic structure. Interested primarily in the formal semantics that result from the evolution of visual data, he chooses an image not for its content but for its useful formal qualities. While this procedure superficially mirrors the methods of bitmapping and filtration made possible by photo-editing programs, Brown, in fact produces these transformations without the aid of the computer. His keen sensibility is informed nevertheless by the technologies that have impacted the contemporary viewpoint. (1)

 

Alex Brown paints with brushes and oil paint. You can see the brushstrokes with a painterly quality, which clearly defines the works as paintings.

Frisbeetown is a large painting, which looks like an excellent, decentered composed abstract painting. It requests a large distance to become figurative (or you can visualize it on your cell phone screen).

In Wetland, at the opposite the viewer gets enough information to visualize a flooded city even if it can be enjoyed as an abstract painting.

Boat looks to be a banal photography of a small fishing boat, except he transformed the flat square pixels into optical cubes, creating a visually complex three D painting.

Two paintings refer to the same subject of flowers, a subject that most contemporary artists feel embarrassed to deal with again. The manipulation of their images is completely different. In Forget me not, you see an arrangement of flowers in space. The artist created a uniform diagonal grid of squares like pixels, and the paint- brushes are only vertical and horizontal. As a result, the viewer enjoys the quality of the composition even more. Garden represents a close up of pink flowers. The colors are very subtly divided in many shades. You are enjoying a cameo of pink various curved shapes interlaced in a complex way.

Alex Brown’s paintings are various experiences of vision of figurative images through the medium of painting.

 

Born in 1966 in Des Moines, Iowa, Alex Brown graduated the Parsons school of design in New York. In 2000 he received the Richard and Hinda Rosenthal Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, New York, NY. Feature Inc. has exhibited him from 1998 to 2009. He was included in museum shows such as The Expanded Eye in Kunsthaus Zürich, Switzerland; Twice Drawn, at Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art, Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, NY; Curious Crystals of Unusual Purity at P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, Long Island City; Post-Digital Painting at the Cranbrook Art Museum, Bloomfield Hills, MI; Glee, Painting Now! at the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, Ridgefield, CT; Bit-by-Bit: Painting and Digital Culture, Numark Gallery, Washington, DC. His work is in the MoMA collection, New York, NY.

 

(1)   Joe Houston in post-digital Painting, p19, published by The Cranbrook Art Museum