Michael Brown

Brown’s vernacular has its roots in American Pop. Almost all work begins with recognizable, common objects from daily life—lawn chairs, mirrors, brooms and pails—which then goes through a painstaking hand-crafted transformation. These objects still retain their essential characteristics, but are entirely remade in different and unexpected materials. Thus, they are handmade–ready-mades in the lineage of Robert Gober. Like Gober, Brown’s works mine the everyday and memory. Gober’s tenderly handmade Sink With Drainboard comes from his memory as a child of his grandmother’s sink. Brown’s father makes a living as a welder – Brown reverently transmutes this into formal welded works of art. Michael pulls objects from the everyday-paintbrushes, brooms, lawn chairs and more – the things we might neglect and renews them. He brings to light both what they were and what they have become.

His latest body of work features the “gold-leaf” painting series inaugurated in his first exhibition in September, 2019. The paint application is sculptural, heavy threads of oil paint are squeezed and woven onto 24 ct. gold leaf on canvas. The symmetry of his previous white or blue paintings, which featured the oil paint radiating from the center with centrifugal force is now disjointed with more complex patterns emerging; two blue on gold-leaf have no center point. The uneven cords of oil are partly an homage to Agnes Martin’s early paintings with horizontal pencil marks.

In other paintings there are oblong concentric circles of different colors in a peacock palette. The gold base continues to provide an intangible radiance and glow. Here Brown has moved closer to traditional painting echoing Dan Christiansen early 70’s work with impastoed minimal white over subtle colors and Kenneth Noland’s “targets.”

At age twenty Brown was included in a seminal museum exhibit of 12 US graduate students at Hudson Vallery MOCA, Peekskill. Within a year his work was included in shows at David Zwirner, Zwirner and Wirth, and with representation at Yvon Lambert Gallery in Paris and New York. A small work of Brown’s on the floor of David Zwirner gallery stood prominently beside the “big names” – Hatoum, Bourgeois, Whiteread, and Gober- in the 2011 exhibition “The House Without the Door.” Brown’s contribution was a small house painter’s brush with a black handle crafted from melted Neil Young records.

Life intervenes. Two representing galleries closed and Brown with urgent pressures withdrew from the studio for a few years. In May 2018 he was included in the first Westchester Art Triennial, and reopened his studio.

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