Charles Browning "Beauty Trap" and "Master Drawings" Exhibition

Schroeder Romero & Shredder

poster for Charles Browning "Beauty Trap" and "Master Drawings" Exhibition

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"Beauty Trap" is Charles Browning's second solo exhibition with the gallery and features eight new paintings full of allegorical allusions focused on the vexed idea of beauty itself. Beautiful and stunningly rendered in detailed oil on canvas, these paintings utilize the Dutch floral and still life painters of the 17th and 18th centuries, in particular the work of Jan van Huysum and Albert Mignon, as an entry point to interrogate ideas of luxury, consumption, and colonialism. Already unnatural pastiches selected from various sources in the original Dutch works, Browning multiplies the unreality of his paintings by juxtaposing the idealized and artificial European still life against an American setting, a Bierstadt canyon or an American Chestnut tree. In this the paintings of Beauty Trap become allegories for consumption and excess ever present in the historic Colonial vision of ripe virgin lands and question our contemporary ideals of status and art. For Browning though this search for new territory to consume, the need for beauty, and indeed the act of painting itself, is ultimately a trap, a cloud of endless possibility and desire that both the viewer and the artist, endlessly circling from detail to detail, cannot escape.

"Master Drawings" is similarly dedicated to centuries of varied representations, here on paper in masterful uses of pen, ink, graphite, and charcoal. The exhibition will feature a great range, from: Théodore Géricault's ink and graphite study from an antique Hercules and Jean-Hippolyte Flandrin's magnificently elegant plans for his mural at the Church of St-Germain-des-Prés, Paris, to Leon Kelly's surreally imagined Birds of the United States and Lucas Samaras's almost psychedelically vibrant skull in Large Drawing #2. With these and many others-including Francois Boucher, John Steuart Curry, Jacques Gamelin, Joan Mitchell, Max Pechstein- we see the primacy of the artist's touch to paper. Whether a quick study, carefully laid out plan, or gestural abstraction, in the hands of these masters the act of drawing-art's most basic building block-is shown as more than conceptual blueprint. We are witnessing the very inner workings of an artist's mind.

[Image: Charles Browning "Beauty Trap (Copulating Sparrows)" (2011) Oil on canvas 30 x 26 in.]

Media

Schedule

from October 13, 2011 to November 12, 2011

Opening Reception on 2011-10-13 from 18:00 to 20:00

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