Eugene Brodsky "New Works"

Sears-Peyton Gallery

poster for Eugene Brodsky "New Works"

This event has ended.

After marrying his German wife, Brodsky began spending a few months a year traveling to Europe to visit friends and family. He is not fond of travel. A reluctant sightseer who is easily bored, Brodsky skips the prescribed “sights” and focuses instead on the edges of things; pointing his camera at a bit of graffiti on a wall in Barcelona, the marks on an old door in Berlin, and an abandoned shopping cart in Hamburg. All of the throw- away images of urban life become his subjects. What matters to Brodsky is that the images be compelling enough to command his sustained attention. He refers to his chosen subjects as “affecting icons”. They are everyday images that resonate as both mysterious and familiar. His trips abroad have become scouting missions, where he seeks out the visual equivalent of background noise for each place he visits and uses his snapshots as source material.

Brodsky, whose mother was a painter, grew up in New York City in a household where art was in the foreground. The heroes of his childhood were Franz Kline and Willem De Kooning. But he has no formal art education. (He majored in political Studies at George Washington University and then went to the New York Studio School for about 10 days). So he is like a very sophisticated outsider who has come up with all kinds of unique ways to make marks.

Brodsky’s working process is to begin with an image or a simple configuration of marks and put it through a complex series of manipulations, which he refers to as a “weird machine” of his own devising. Steps in the process can include: drawing from life, photography, tracing, cutting, reversing, inverting, scanning, blowing up, cropping, tearing, cutting, stenciling, pulling ink across the surface with a paint paddle, silk screening, and transferring. The resulting quality of mark and surface is completely distinctive and unique to Brodsky.

Media

Schedule

from April 02, 2009 to May 09, 2009

Opening Reception on 2009-04-02 from 17:00 to 19:00

Artist(s)

Eugene Brodsky

  • Facebook

    Reviews

    All content on this site is © their respective owner(s).
    New York Art Beat (2008) - About - Contact - Privacy - Terms of Use