Art360: Derek Brahney

A multidisciplinary artist based in New York, Brahney works across sculpture, drawing, photography, and conceptual illustration. Trained as an industrial designer, he utilizes mundane objects, unexpected juxtapositions and absurdist humor to look critically at contemporary American life. 

IMPOSTERS is a series of exhibition posters celebrating fake shows by fake artists at fake galleries around the world. The posters feature images of real artworks from Derek Brahney’s Brushstrokes series. Celebrating seminal exhibitions that never happened, the posters immortalize the Brushstrokes in the canon of art history by sneaking in the backdoor uninvited - after all as galleries close, online viewing rooms open, and life is lived online whether or not exhibitions physically occur becomes incidental - why not move straight to the commemoration of them.

Brushstrokes are hybrids of painting, photography and sculpture. To create these unique works, Branhey emotively paints hundreds of brushstrokes on large sheets of vellum. This freeform approach is followed by a more closely analytical process whereby the artist selects his favorite brushstrokes based on their color and form. Those selected are then arranged into carefully considered compositions, digitally scanned, enlarged, printed onto sculptural wall reliefs and sealed in high-gloss resin. Fusing a multitude of mediums within a single work and moving the process from emotive to the analytical, the artist locates and heightens the tension between gestural abstraction and a more non-objective hard edge abstraction committed to color and form, recontextualizing and contemporizing this art historical conversation and questioning the absolute nature of both when so much illusion is inherent. 

It was such an honor to have Brahney as our inaugural artist, presenting a number of works that have rotated through the space over the last six months as many sold and found new homes.

ART360 is an ongoing series in our 360 Atlantic Avenue space that showcases the work of artists that we love and want to celebrate. Informed by the past, speaking to the future and placing you in the present, art in your home is more than decoration - it frames and reflects who you are within that. Through ART360 we are excited to present artists that have both the aesthetic strength and the conceptual depth to ground their work in continued relevance and ongoing interest.