Roger Brown
November 12, 2019 – January 11, 2020
Opening: Tuesday, November 12th, 6:00 - 8:00 pm

Venus Over Manhattan
980 Madison Avenue
New York, NY 10075

(New York, NY) – Venus Over Manhattan is pleased to present an exhibition of work by Roger Brown, organized in collaboration with the Roger Brown Study Collection at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and Kavi Gupta. Comprising a large group of paintings that spans the breadth of his career, the presentation surveys the development of Brown’s production. In conjunction with the exhibition, the gallery will publish a catalogue featuring two new texts on the artist by Lisa Stone, Curator of the Roger Brown Study Collection, and Dan Nadel, Curator at Large, Jan Shrem and Maria Manetti Shrem Museum of Art, UC Davis, as well as pages from Brown’s sketchbooks that relate to the works on view. The exhibition will be on view from November 12th, 2019 through January 11th, 2020.

The idiosyncrasies of Brown’s interests were forged long before he moved to Chicago in 1962. Brown grew up in Alabama, where his parents owned successful groceries and belonged to the Church of Christ, known for its “fire and brimstone” intensity. Brown’s father, himself an accomplished woodworker, instilled in his children a love of good craftsmanship and handmade things. His mother and her large extended family recounted their extensive family history, emphasizing the importance of narrative and place. Long car trips exposed Brown to the variety of the American landscape, and with his brother, he devoured comic books and movies at the Martin Theater, an Art Deco movie house in Opelika. As Brown said in 1987, “I really think that my going in the direction I did comes from being Southern.” Two of Brown’s professors at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago encouraged him to draw from these diverse experiences in his work. Ray Yoshida, an artist and Brown’s painting instructor, organized trips to the Maxwell Street Flea Market, where Yoshida encouraged students to find inspiration in visually powerful, non-traditional sources. Whitney Halstead, professor of Art History, was an early advocate of the importance of non-western, folk, and vernacular art, and led groups to the Field Museum of Natural History, where Brown saw African and Oceanic objects. Brown synthesized and made reference to these diverse sources for the duration of his career, making and collecting work that renegotiated traditional art historical hierarchies.

After a long road trip with his partner, the architect George Veronda, Brown’s paintings became increasingly focused on the American landscape. This work is characterized by a reliance on rigid compositional structuring, visually dazzling patterning, and the incorporation of Brown’s recurrent motifs. Exploiting repetition and variation, patterned landscapes began to consume entire compositions, where vistas appear like quilted textiles, with stitches suggested by hedgerows. He began to experiment with patterned clouds in 1974, and his ominous, scalloped skies became a fixed presence in his later work. With this set of compositional strategies, Brown’s paintings became increasingly polemical, political, and sardonic. With meticulously detailed compositions, he skewered the New York art scene, rampant suburban sprawl, and the human forces behind environmental catastrophe. Taken together, Brown’s visually powerful and carefully rendered works attest to force of synthesizing a diverse range of sources to make a deeply personal, and widely resonant, art.