Brad Brown: Serials

Hosfelt Gallery will present the first Bay Area exhibition of Brad Brown’s work in six years, with a show comprised of approximately one thousand individual works on paper. This body of work is based on a combination of systematic procedure, spontaneity, theme and variation.

Each piece is comprised of an even-numbered group of 6 x 6-inch sheets of paper. With all of the pages of a given piece spread in front of him, a mark or gesture is applied to a single page in the group. The “same” gesture is repeated on each page. In repeating the gesture, there is inevitable variation.

A second gesture – a response to, but distinct from, the first – is laid onto the first sheet and again mutates as it is reiterated from page to page. Distinctions between successive gestures are based in part on a shift from one medium – ink, graphite, oil crayon, watercolor, walnut ink, or a collaged element – to another. Remaining true to spontaneity, Brown may apply the “same” gesture in different positions on each succeeding page. The sensibility and direction of a piece will change, often drastically, with the addition of each gesture.

The pages in each series read off of one another – back and forth, up and down. Each page is both a distinct work and connected to each other page in its series. Each series is both separate from and related to each preceding and succeeding series.

Brad Brown was born in North Carolina and recently moved from Brooklyn back to the Bay Area. His work is in a number of museum collections including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.