Christopher Brown
Recent Paintings
February 2 – March 17, 2012
John Berggruen Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of recent paintings by Christopher Brown. This exhibition will open on Thursday, February 2nd, and will run through Saturday, March 17th. An opening reception will be held for the artist on February 2nd, from 5:30-7:30 pm.
Recent Paintings highlights work by Christopher Brown in the last year. This exhibition includes familiar imagery used by the artist including bicycle and horse races and explores Brown’s continued interest in the relationship between movement and light. These paintings feature figurative imagery with broad landscape panoramas that showcase not only the painterly quality to Brown’s work, but also how easily he blurs the line between representation and abstraction.
One of the works in the exhibition, Low Road, perfectly demonstrates this line. A group of bikers seem to materialize out of the corner of the canvas; abstracted black circles make way for more structured bicycle tires as the image reaches the center of the canvas. The hills and sky once so clear in the middle of the work blur and seem to literally tug at the corners of the canvas becoming multiple brush strokes rather than a discernable form. While these works are typical of Brown’s previous work in their photographic references these recent pieces also reveal a different more in depth exploration of his subject matter resulting in a complexity within the canvas.
Christopher Brown was born in Camp Lejeune, North Carolina in 1951. He received his B.F.A from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1973 and his M.F.A at the University of California, Davis in 1976. He has held teaching positions at the University of California, Berkeley and is currently a professor of painting at the California College of the Arts. His work is represented in numerous museum collections including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, and the Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery. Brown has been honored with several awards since the beginning of his career, including three National Endowment for the Arts awards. He currently lives and works in Berkeley, California.
For further information and photographs, please contact the gallery at 415.781.4629 or info@berggruen.com. The gallery hours are Monday – Friday, 9:30-5:30, and Saturday, 10:30-5:00.
