Mike Weiss Gallery is proud to announce that it is now representing the Brooklyn-based artist Deborah Brown. Her work is currently included in our summer group show, School’s Out!, and she will have her first solo show with the gallery in February of 2017.
“Brown is taking part in what has been interpreted as a resurgence of abstraction, but is in fact a pair of popular mainstreams travelling side by side. The pure abstractionists keep to the relatively safe waters of inventive ebullience, while Brown and company brave the rapids of recognizable subject matter, while holding fast to the same improvisational attitude that marks abstraction’s timeless appeal. It seems obvious to me that the latter stream is the more difficult to navigate, especially for artists today who seem so reluctant to cross into the waters of unguarded sentiment.” – Art Critic Peter Malone in Hyperallergic
Brown begins her paintings with archival exploration, studiously mining images from art history, mythology, and literature. Put through the wringer of her imagination, this relatively tame subject matter takes on fresh, multidimensional life. Depicting, for example, Picasso-esque features onto Greco-Roman figures, or sculptural forms into expressionistic landscapes – the works are rooted in history at the same time that they are historically inaccurate. Brown uses this ambiguous relationship – one defined by multiplicity – to liberate Romantic and Modern art from the weighty confines of their own histories. Displacing figures into unexpected contexts, Brown transforms them into whimsical, anthropomorphic characters with which we can identify across a broad spectrum of emotions.
Deborah Brown lives and works in New York City. Her work resides in many notable public collections, including The Indianapolis Museum of Art, The DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park, The Frederick R. Weisman Museum of Art, The Bass Museum of Art, The Art Museum of South Texas, The Orlando Museum of Art, as well as in many well-known private collections, including the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, the United States Department of State (Colombia), ExxonMobil, the Amerada Hess Corporation, and Fidelity Investments, among others.
Mike Weiss Gallery, 520 W 24, NYC, NY 10011