Type:
Country:
Venue:
Categories:
Gallery 16 is pleased to present an exhibition of new paintings by artist Jason Middlebrook. Breakdown is the first West Coast solo show by the California native since 2019. Those familiar with Middlebrook’s work will recognize the geometric patterns and painted elements that have adorned most of Middlebrook’s paintings over the past decade.
Living in the Hudson Valley, the natural world surrounds the artist and forever inspires his work. Middlebrook has long been interested in our complex and often adversarial relationship with nature. The colorful, straight lines and precise angles of his paintings lay over the historical, organic rings of the tree and create a juxtaposition that highlights the tension between humans and nature.
“My work is broken into two parts. The first is a skin that I lay over the top of nature, somewhat like a sidewalk or a parking lot. The skin is just visiting, it’s covering but respecting the borders it has been given. The borders in my case are the shapes of trees, the trunks and limbs are what I choose to make paintings on, the paintings become the skin. I respond to the compression of time and the organic shape that has grown. I respond to the order of the tree and the form that it became. The second aspect of my work is my reaction and interpretation of nature. In all cases the grain and the shape of wood dictate the direction of the painting which always starts with multiple drawings.”
Artist:
Jason Middlebrook lives and works in Hudson, New York. He received his Bachelor of Fine Arts in 1990 from the University of California at Santa Cruz, and his Master of Fine Arts in 1994 from the San Francisco Art Institute. He also participated in the Independent Study Program at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY in 1994-1995, and completed the IASPIS residency in Stockholm, Sweden in 2009-2010.
His work has been the subject of major exhibitions and public projects around the world, including the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, the Broad Art Museum and Site Santa Fe. Middlebrook has mounted solo exhibitions at a number of institutions, including the New Museum (New York), the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum (Connecticut), and the Santa Monica Museum of Art.
His work is included in the permanent collections of Addison Gallery of American Art, Andover, MA; Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY; Altoids Collection, New York, NY; Arthouse, Austin, TX; British Airways Art Collection, Waterside, United Kingdom; Denver Art Museum, Denver, CO; Harn Museum, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL; Marte Museum, San Salvador, El Salvador; Microsoft Corporate Art Collection, Redmond, WA; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, IL; Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; NASA Art Program, Washington, D.C.; New Museum, New York, NY; Pacific Bell, San Francisco, CA; Progressive Art Collection, Mayfield, OH; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY.
501 3rd St
San Francisco, CA 94107
- 195 reads
