Michael Brown: Keep On Truckin' — Michael Brown

The gallery is pleased to present Keep On Truckin', a solo retrospective of works by American artist Michael Brown. Spanning nearly two decades of artistic effort, the exhibition places early sculptural works from the mid-2000s in direct conversation with a new body of paintings created for this exhibition.

The exhibition takes its title from the phrase popularized by cartoonist R. Crumb, whose 1968 one-page comic “Keep On Truckin’,” first published in Zap Comix, became an emblem of American counterculture. Crumb’s cartoon is a visual riff on the lyrics of Blind Boy Fuller’s song “Truckin’ My Blues Away,” depicting a procession of men striding across shifting landscapes, an image so widely reproduced and reimagined that it outgrew the page and became folklore in its own right. Brown, a tattoo artist by trade, uses “Keep On Truckin’,” and turns it into a new symbol.

At the center of the exhibition are three new oil stick paintings: a cartoon middle finger, rendered with swagger and a wide grin, arms thrown open. It is equal parts anti-hero and folk talisman, its strength comes from the alchemy of turning a bad feeling into an image that is defiant and loveable. Painted directly in oil stick to maintain the immediacy of drawing while retaining the physical weight of paint, the three canvases are deliberately spaced alongside each other on the wall, so that walking past them feels less like viewing a painting and more like watching someone strut, evoking a comic strip or filmstrip.

A second body of work titled, Oxidation Paintings, features canvases that start with a base of dirt, clay, and mud. Exposed to the elements outdoors, they are rained on, weathered, and marked by chance. They echo Andy Warhol’s Oxidation Paintings, which were made on copper pigment. Those paintings have long been regarded as both an homage to and a criticism of Abstract Expressionist machismo. Brown takes this idea further. Once the ground has dried and set, he follows its swirling patterns with 24-karat gold leaf, applied by hand. By monumentalizing these materials and the forces that created them, Brown employs a classic gilding technique that has historically been reserved for our highest and most sacred institutions. In turn, he makes those materials and forces into something worthy of devotion and reverence.

Also included are earlier works, as well as newer renditions of earlier themes. In 2006, Brown was included in a show at Hudson Valley MOCA featuring twelve U.S. art students. Among his works were pieces that would form one of his most popular bodies of work: the “cracked mirrors” of the In the Meantime series. Brown shattered plate glass and copied its spiderweb cracks in stainless steel. The result was a room filled with fractured, elegiac fragments that were cold, exacting, and strangely moving mosaics. In another series, first shown in 2008, the artist's vinyl records were melted down and molded into everyday plastic objects. A new rendition of this earlier theme included in the show is titled Reincarnation (Self Portrait as Bleach Bottle), also constructed from the artists personal vinyl records and asks how we construct our identities through consumption of culture and how that often doesn't lead to redemption or real meaning. In Six Pack (Shitty Jeff Koons), from 2007, Budweiser cans polished to a mirror shine sit in quiet, self-aware conversation with Jeff Koons and mock the artistic tradition of trying to turn the disposable and temporary into the eternal.

Taken together, the works in Keep On Truckin' trace a wide-ranging body of work that circles back on itself. Pop instinct, ritual, and self-deprecating humor all move simultaneously toward something that feels unmistakably like arrival.

Michael Brown (b. 1982, Poughkeepsie, NY) lives and works in Dutchess County, NY. He began his career as a sculptor, a background that is evident in his work. He is best known for his Gold Leaf oil paintings, in which heavy threads of pigment are woven across gilded surfaces, and his Cracked Mirrors series, wall-mounted stainless steel sculptures that meticulously replicate the spiderweb fractures of shattered plate glass.

At the age of twenty, Brown was included in a museum exhibition of twelve U.S. art students at Hudson Valley MOCA, Peekskill, NY, and quickly moved to the forefront of the contemporary art scene, with exhibitions at David Zwirner and Hauser & Wirth, and representation at Yvon Lambert Gallery in Paris and New York. In May 2018, he was included in the inaugural Westchester Art Triennial. His work has been featured in The New York Times, Artforum, and Time Out New York, and is held in prominent collections including the Beth DeWoody Rudin Collection; Hudson Valley MOCA, Peekskill, NY; the Rennie Collection, Vancouver, Canada; the Sagamore Hotel Collection, Miami Beach, FL; and the collection of Sherry and Joel Mallin, New York, NY.