Michael Brown

Michael Brown began as a sculptor, a history that is still evident in his work. Known for his “gold-leaf” oil paintings, he continues to extend his artistic vocabulary.

Brown’s gold-leaf paintings possess a sculptural quality that he achieves with heavy threads of oil paint woven onto 24k gold leaf on canvas. The oil paint radiates from the center with a centrifugal force. The uneven cords of oil are partly an homage to Agnes Martin’s early paintings with horizontal pencil marks. These paintings by Brown emerged from his history of sculpting banal objects out of incongruous materials. He called attention to the quiet beauty of forms and materials in his reimagining of buckets and cracked mirrors. The palette of his distinctive impasto paintings is reduced to a few reoccurring colors, mostly a deep blue, a soft white, and occasionally a cadmium red. The gold base dispenses an intangible radiance and glow.

Michael Brown lives and works in upstate New York. At age twenty he was included in a seminal museum exhibit of 12 US graduate students at Hudson Valley MOCA, Peekskill and quickly inducted into the forefront of the contemporary art scene with exhibitions at David Zwirner, Zwirner and Wirth, and with representation at Yvon Lambert Gallery in Paris and New York. In May 2018 he was included in the first Westchester Art Triennial. His work has been featured in The New York Times, Artforum, Time Out New York, and is in prominent collections around the world including the Beth deWoody Rudin Collection; The Hudson Valley Center for Contemporary Art in Peekskill, NY; the Rennie Collection in Vancouver, Canada; the Sagamore Hotel Collection, Miami Beach, FL; and the collection of Sherry and Joel Mallin in New York.