Contemporary Art and Culture
Farrell Brickhouse’s exhibition at JJ Murphy Gallery in the Lower East Side marks a significant milestone in Brickhouse’s artistic journey. It is his first solo exhibition at the gallery and his first one-person show in over a decade. The works on display, all created between 2020 and 2024 at his new home and studio in Hudson, NY, provide an insight into the artist’s evolution in painting and picture-making over this period.
Artist Beverly Peterson has been squirreling away the components of Self-Storage in her studio over several years—collecting, modifying, situating, upending, and repositioning things, paintings, photographs, video, and film. She describes this work as a “deeply personal, emotional, and immersive experience that invites visitors to reflect on their own memories as they explore a dreamlike environment.” It is that, but that’s like describing a particular person as an “ambulating biped with hair.” There’s more.
During the Coronavirus pandemic, Art Spiel is reaching out to artists to learn how they are coping.
As a mature artist Farrell Brickhouse states: “I have this large vocabulary to draw from, imagery that has woven its way thru my entire career is available and malleable even as new stories continue to emerge.” He has a long Exhibition history in New York and across the U.S. A. including One Person Shows @ Julian Pretto Gallery, Max Protetch Gallery, Pamela Auchincloss Gallery, Life on Mars Gallery, John Davis Gallery, Fred Giampietro Gallery and elsewhere. His work has been reviewed in the major publications. Farrell has taught at The School of Visual Arts since 1980 and recently retired.
Curated by Michael David and Martin Dull
January 11 – January 27, 2019
Opening Reception Friday Jan 11, 6-9PM
All images by Sharilyn Neidhardt
The work in “New Narrative Now,” curated by Michael David and Martin Dull at M David & Co. is united by a particularly muscular and aggressive kind of paint handling – unsurprising from a gallery well-known for cultivating abstract expressionist work. The paintings also share lyrical and mythical storytelling qualities. Recognizable figures flicker and bend across these canvases, wading through turgid waters, or wrestling with ropes of paint, or bathing in dreamy color. Animals and toys crowd some canvases, women stretch tortured forms across others. Personal mythologies illuminate and infuse each canvas, casting a mysterious spell for the viewer.
I have been following Farrell Brickhouse’s work since 2014, when he showed his work at Life on Mars in Bushwick. You do not just “view” Brickhouse’s paintings, you experience them on a deeply intimate level. He unabashadly talks about painting in relation to “soul” and “subconscience”. As a painter who can show an outstanding body of work which convincingly resurects these modernist notions from oblivion, he also freshens these notions for the next generation of artists. Farrell Brickhouse graciously conducted with me the following interview.