Brent Birnbaum “Seven Games”

Denny Dimin Gallery

[Image: Brent Birnbaum "A Landscape" (2018-2019) Boardgames on mounted Dibond, 28.25 x 40 in/72 x 102 cm]

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Denny Dimin Gallery presents a solo exhibition by Brent Birnbaum. Seven Games is his second solo exhibition with the gallery.

Birnbaum is a voracious collector of cast-off consumer goods, such as mini-refrigerators, treadmills, Ikea shelves, and snuggies, which he meticulously repurposes into artworks. He is best known for his unique acumen for prankster appropriation tactics, which he sensibly deploys in works that strongly connect with art history, from Duchamp to minimalist sculpture.

Seven Games is a new body of work that continues Birnbaum’s practice of appropriation. Birnbaum’s materials for this body of work are over 200 discarded board games that he found and collected over nearly a decade, including identifiable ones such as Clue and Life, as well as more niche games. Birnbaum has deconstructed and re-collaged fragments of the board games, creating new compositions for the viewer to explore.

Life The Game, the monumental work, is an elaborate board game offering numerous imaginative, poetic, and playful paths through life in intricate detail. Personal details, inside jokes, and political intrigue all populate the work, rewarding close perusal. Smaller works deal with related themes in unique ways: One to One Hundred contains a path from the numbers one to one hundred around a spiral, evoking the passage through a full life. Two small works, Start/Finish I and II pass directly from Start to Finish, with only a few simple squares in between.

Brent Birnbaum was born in 1977 in Dallas, Texas. He lives and works in Queens, NY and Amsterdam, NY. He received his MFA in 2006 from the School of Visual Arts in New York City and his BFA in 2001 from the University of North Texas, Denton. He co-founded Topless, a seasonal exhibition space in Rockaway Beach, NY, and has an extensive exhibition history, showing at Sammlung Schroth, Germany (catalog); the Abrons Art Center, NY; Casino Luxembourg, Luxembourg; Marta Herford, Germany; The New Bedford Art Museum, MA; Marianne Boesky Gallery, NY; and Regina Rex, NY. His work has been featured in The New York Times, Hyperallergic, New York Magazine, ARTNEWS, Artsy Magazine, Huffpost, artnet news, and Artforum.