NYAB Event - Mia Brownell “Delightful, Delicious, Disgusting”

Mia Brownell “Delightful, Delicious, Disgusting”

J. Cacciola Gallery

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J. Cacciola Gallery is proud to present Delightful, Delicious, Disgusting, an exhibition featuring new paintings by Mia Brownell. This is the artist’s first solo show with J. Cacciola Gallery.

Molecular models and the history of still life painting inspire Mia Brownell’s compositions. Her paintings simultaneously draw on images retrieved from Protein Data Bank files (where the structures of proteins and nucleic acids are recorded) and the history of the painted food still life. She emulates the masters while introducing a crosscurrent of contemporary themes including the complexities of the industrialized food complex as well as the fundamental schemes of the natural universe.

In this new series, Brownell adds to her vocabulary the connection of pollination and the industrialized food complex. She brings attention to the recent astronomical loss of honeybees in the United States, Canada, and Europe. The work focuses on primal questions about food—from how it is grown to how it functions as a signifier in society with a particular focus on pollination.

Brownell flips the idea of the classic still life on its head. Traditional subject matter is given new life through her modern compositions, and they are anything but still. While, the subject of fruit, flowers and bees are not unexpected in the realm of still life painting, the action, movement and energy that you feel while looking at the paintings is unique to Brownell.

Mia Brownell studied painting at Carnegie Mellon University and Parsons School of Design in Paris. (She also studied printmaking, philosophy, ethics and dance at various institutions in Paris and the US) before getting her MFA at State University of New York. Her work is included in several public and private collections, including the Addison Gallery of American Art, National Academy of Sciences, Fidelity Investments and Wellington Management. Brownell has exhibited extensively and currently has a traveling retrospective of her work that will be accompanying her exhibition in New York: “Delightful, Delicious, Disgusting: Paintings by Mia Brownell 2003-2013.” The exhibit will travel to Hunterdon Art Museum in New Jersey, Juniata College Museum of Art in Pennsylvania and the Housatonic Museum of Art in Connecticut throughout 2014.