Michael Brown

Michael Brown (b. 1982, Poughkeepsie, NY) lives and works in New York, NY. Brown began as a sculptor, a history that is still evident in his work. Known for his "gold leaf" oil paintings, he continues to expand his artistic vocabulary. These paintings have a sculptural quality that he achieves by weaving heavy threads of oil paint onto 24-karat gold leaf on canvas. The oil paint and gold leaf radiate from the center with a centrifugal force. The uneven threads of oil paint are in part an homage to Agnes Martin's early paintings with horizontal pencil marks.

These paintings by Brown emerged from his history of sculpting banal objects from incongruous materials. He drew attention to the quiet beauty of form and material in his reimagining of buckets and cracked mirrors. The palette of his distinctive impasto paintings is reduced to a few recurring colors, mostly a deep blue, a soft white, and occasionally a cadmium red. The gold base imparts an intangible radiance and glow.

At the age of twenty, Michael Brown was included in a seminal museum exhibition of 12 U.S. graduate students at Hudson Valley MOCA, Peekskill, NY, and quickly moved to the forefront of the contemporary art scene with exhibitions at David Zwirner, Zwirner and Wirth, and representation at Yvon Lambert Gallery in Paris and New York. In May 2018, he was included in the inaugural 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; Hudson Valley MOCA 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, NY.