NYAB Event - Thomas Broadbent “Inertia”

Thomas Broadbent “Inertia”

The Front Room

This event has ended.

Front Room Gallery presents a solo exhibition of new paintings by Thomas Broadbent. In the exhibition “Inertia” Broadbent introduces two new bodies of work. The first is a continuation of Broadbent’s previous body of work, “Adaptation”, watercolor still lives featuring finches, chickadees, ravens and other birds rendered sensitively with a naturalist’s eye for detail often in conjunction with objects such as stacks of books, Modernist furniture, and ladders. These objects could possibly be looked at as stand-ins for society in an ambiguous relationship with nature that is absurd—and yet peculiarly comfortable.

The second, and never before seen body of work that will be on view, consists of highly detailed watercolors based on actual asteroids as they travel through space. These asteroid “portraits” portray specific asteroids currently floating through the cosmos. Broadbent paints these floating space bodies on a white background, at once clinical and also philosophical. His beautifully rendered astrological bodies might question the core of our existence, our evolution as a planet. Or perhaps they are simply representations of massive physical objects reverently painted in black and white lit by starlight with deep dark shadowy craters. Like all of Broadbent’s endeavors the answers are not that cut and dried.

Inertia describes the resistance of any physical object to any change in its state of motion, the continuation of the straight line or maintaining a state of rest. And while Broadbent’s asteroids may be hurling through space at thousands of mile per hour his birds peacefully coexist with their surroundings as if they evolved along with the books and chairs from the beginning. The inertia of movement keeps asteroids moving, unchanged in their flow through space, while birds and artifices of nature continue with their internal directives, unchanging, yet challenged by man’s presence. Both are timeless and timely.

Broadbent has shown extensively throughout the U.S. as well as internationally. Broadbent’s numerous solo exhibitions include the Visual Art’s Center of New Jersey, Croxhapox Gallery (Gent, Belgium) Voorkamer Gallery (Lier, Belgium) Inspace gallery (Beijing, China) and the Newark Arts Council. Broadbent’s work has been reviewed in The New York Times, The New Jersey Star-Ledger, NY Arts, The Brooklyn Rail and numerous other publications.

Media

• Painting
• Drawing

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