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Brian Calvin

Past exhibition
September 7 - November 7, 2017
  • Overview
  • Installation Views
  • Works
  • Press
Overview
Brian Calvin Looking Over, 2017 Acrylic on canvas 108 x 72 inches (274.32 x 182.88 cm)
Brian Calvin
Looking Over, 2017
Acrylic on canvas
108 x 72 inches
(274.32 x 182.88 cm)

In his fifth solo show at Anton Kern Gallery, the California-based painter Brian Calvin presents a new body of work featuring tightly-cropped portrait paintings, colored pencil drawings, and anthropomorphic wooden sculptures. 

 

Among the new group of paintings, the artist introduces tondos (circular shaped canvases), whose cropping eliminates any sense of background or place, and underscores the flatness of his compositions. Also, for the first time at the gallery, Calvin presents sculptures: stilt-size painted wooden legs leaning against the wall, suggesting a group of idle teenage loiterers. The exhibition demonstrates the evolution of Calvin’s reduced style of depicting the human form, and a looseness that opens up his pictorial vocabulary.

 

Through repetition of his archetypal female figure, the artist invites us to look past the inviting face we are confronted by, and consider the idiosyncrasies of his formal choices. By reducing the face to its essential features, and isolating eyes, lips, hair, each work offers pieces of a code for the viewer to interpret. 

 

Oversize eyes gaze past the viewer. Lips are paused between forming words, revealing charmingly imperfect teeth and soft pink tongues. Faces are cropped and abstracted to various degrees, drawing attention to specific features. Mini landscapes appear in fingernails, the shapes and gradations in eyes and lips mimic sunsets over a horizon. Calvin’s dreamy palette of pastels and ocean blues reflects the eternal summer of California and the sweetness of youth. 

 

Throughout the exhibition, the artist presents exercises in seeing. He plays with doubling; hanging works that are nearly identical, but differ in terms of scale, orientation, or expression. Titles such as A Gauche and A Droit, Inhale and Exhale suggest opposites, sequences, or perhaps a duality in states of being. In Sleeper he places mouths where the eyes should be and vice versa. This simple inversion frustrates our instinct to rearrange the features, creating an exciting optical tension.

 

Calvin’s work is asking, not answering, questions. Unconcerned with representation or narrative, the artist frees himself to meditate in the abstract activity of painting and explore the history of portraiture - from cave paintings, to the Renaissance, to the selfie - tapping into a primitive human desire to create images. 

 

Brian Calvin (born in 1969 in Visalia, California) is an American artist who lives and works in Ojai, California. He received his B.A. from the University of California, Berkeley in 1992 and his M.F.A from The Art Institute of Chicago in 1994. He received honors in 2003 during his Californian Arts Council Fellowship with the Art Production Fund in Giverny, France.  His work is included in the public collections of such institutions as the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles; DePaul Art Museum, Chicago; Portland Art Museum, Portland; the Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach; and the Henry Art Gallery at the University of Washington, Seattle. In 2015 a mid-career survey exhibition, End of Messages, was shown at Le Consortium, Dijon, France, which then travelled to the Mu.ZEE in Ostend, Belgium. Recent group exhibitions include Forest on the Edge of Time at The Pit II, Los Angeles (2017) and Los Angeles: A Fiction, Museum of Contemporary Art, Lyon, France which was first shown at the Astrup Fearnley Museet in Oslo, Norway.

 

 

Download Press Release
List of Works
Installation Views
  • Installation view of Brian Calvin's show. One work featured here at the entryway of the gallery.
  • Installation view of Alessandro Pessoli's show Against Me. One painted work next to two sculptural works titled Legs I and Legs II.
  • Installation view of Alessandro Pessoli's show Against Me. First floor, multiple works shown,
  • Installation view of Alessandro Pessoli's show Against Me. Two works presented.
  • Installation view of Alessandro Pessoli's show Against Me. One work shown.,
  • Installation view of Alessandro Pessoli's show Against Me. Many works featured.
  • Installation view of Alessandro Pessoli's show Against Me. Second floor view.
  • Installation view of Alessandro Pessoli's show Against Me. Two works presented.
Works
  • Brian Calvin Exhale, 2017
    Brian Calvin
    Exhale, 2017
  • Brian Calvin Inhale, 2017
    Brian Calvin
    Inhale, 2017
  • Brian Calvin The Legs II, 2017
    Brian Calvin
    The Legs II, 2017
  • Brian Calvin The Legs I, 2017
    Brian Calvin
    The Legs I, 2017
  • Brian Calvin Focusing, 2017
    Brian Calvin
    Focusing, 2017
  • Brian Calvin Hand, 2017
    Brian Calvin
    Hand, 2017
  • Brian Calvin Longneck, 2017
    Brian Calvin
    Longneck, 2017
  • Brian Calvin Looking Over, 2017
    Brian Calvin
    Looking Over, 2017
  • Brian Calvin à Gauche, 2017
    Brian Calvin
    à Gauche, 2017
  • Brian Calvin The Silent Treatment, 2017
    Brian Calvin
    The Silent Treatment, 2017
  • Brian Calvin Warp, 2015-2017
    Brian Calvin
    Warp, 2015-2017
  • Brian Calvin à Droit, 2017
    Brian Calvin
    à Droit, 2017
  • Brian Calvin In The Distance, 2017
    Brian Calvin
    In The Distance, 2017
  • Brian Calvin Daughter, 2017
    Brian Calvin
    Daughter, 2017
  • Brian Calvin Untitled, 2017
    Brian Calvin
    Untitled, 2017
  • Brian Calvin Untitled, 2017
    Brian Calvin
    Untitled, 2017
  • Brian Calvin Untitled, 2017
    Brian Calvin
    Untitled, 2017
  • Brian Calvin Untitled, 2017
    Brian Calvin
    Untitled, 2017
  • Brian Calvin Untitled, 2017
    Brian Calvin
    Untitled, 2017
  • Brian Calvin Untitled, 2017
    Brian Calvin
    Untitled, 2017
  • Brian Calvin Untitled, 2017
    Brian Calvin
    Untitled, 2017
  • Brian Calvin Untitled, 2017
    Brian Calvin
    Untitled, 2017
  • Brian Calvin Untitled, 2017
    Brian Calvin
    Untitled, 2017
  • Brian Calvin Untitled, 2017
    Brian Calvin
    Untitled, 2017
  • Brian Calvin Untitled, 2017
    Brian Calvin
    Untitled, 2017
  • Brian Calvin Untitled, 2017
    Brian Calvin
    Untitled, 2017
  • Brian Calvin Untitled, 2017
    Brian Calvin
    Untitled, 2017
  • Brian Calvin Untitled, 2017
    Brian Calvin
    Untitled, 2017
  • Brian Calvin Untitled, 2017
    Brian Calvin
    Untitled, 2017
  • Brian Calvin Sleeper, 2017
    Brian Calvin
    Sleeper, 2017
  • Brian Calvin Breather, 2017
    Brian Calvin
    Breather, 2017
  • Brian Calvin Silence, 2017
    Brian Calvin
    Silence, 2017
  • Brian Calvin Formation, 2017
    Brian Calvin
    Formation, 2017
Press
  • Top 10

    Jack Bankowsky, Artforum, December 1, 2017
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  • Brian Calvin at Anton Kern Gallery

    Blouin Artinfo, September 21, 2017
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  • Brian Calvin

    The New Yorker, September 18, 2017
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  • The New Yorker: Art

    The New Yorker, September 18, 2017
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Related artist

  • Brian Calvin

    Brian Calvin

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