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The Captive 1975

Joan Brown

The Captive

1975

Enamel on canvas

85 x 73 inches

JBRp 88

New Year's Eve #2 1973

Joan Brown

New Year's Eve #2

1973

Enamel on canvas

72 x 84 inches

JBRp 01

The Cypress Trees 1980

Joan Brown

The Cypress Trees

1980

Oil enamel on canvas

96 x 78 inches

JBRp 91

The Swimmers #2 (The Crawl) 1974

Joan Brown

The Swimmers #2 (The Crawl)

1974

Enamel on canvas

73 x 85 inches

JBRp 59

Dancers in a Landscape, 1974

Joan Brown

Dancers in a Landscape, 

1974

Enamel on canvas

84 x 72 inches

JBRp 94

Acrobats and Spectator 1974

Joan Brown

Acrobats and Spectator on New Year's Eve

1974

Oil on canvas

96 1/2 x 78 inches

JBRp 93

The Fan (Homage to Sai Babha) 1980

Joan Brown

The Fan (Homage to Sai Babha)

1980

Oil enamel on canvas

72 3/4 x 61 inches

JBRp 92

Charlie Sava and Friends (Rembrandt and Goya)  1973

Joan Brown

Charlie Sava and Friends (Rembrandt and Goya)

1973

Enamel on canvas

96 x 72 inches

JBRp 87

Wolf in Room 1974

Joan Brown

Wolf in Room

1974

Enamel on canvas

97 x 72 inches

JBRp 95

Homage to Akhenaton  1983

Joan Brown

Homage to Akhenaton

1983

Enamel on canvas

72 x 120 inches

JBRp 18

Manuel of Cordova at Plaza de Torros, Ronda  1961

Joan Brown

Manuel of Cordova at Plaza de Torros, Ronda

1961

Enamel on paper

26 3/4 x 19 3/4 inches

JBrd 128

Ronda Street Scene  1961

Joan Brown

Ronda Street Scene

1961

Enamel on paper

18 3/4 x 26 3/4 inches

JBRd 127

Flamenco Dancer  1961

Joan Brown

Flamenco Dancer

1961

Enamel on paper

26 1/2 x 11 1/2 inches

JBRd 130

Noel's First Christmas  1963

Joan Brown

Noel's First Christmas

1963

Oil on canvas

72 x 48 inches

JBRp 84

Installation view, Joan Brown, George Adams Gallery, New York, 2017

Installation view, Joan Brown, George Adams Gallery, New York, 2017

Installation view, Joan Brown, George Adams Gallery, New York, 2017

Installation view, Joan Brown, George Adams Gallery, New York, 2017

Installation view, Joan Brown, George Adams Gallery, New York, 2017

Installation view, Joan Brown, George Adams Gallery, New York, 2017

Installation view, Joan Brown, George Adams Gallery, New York, 2017

Installation view, Joan Brown, George Adams Gallery, New York, 2017

Press Release

The George Adams Gallery begins the fall season with an exhibition of paintings by Joan Brown (1938-1990). Covering the years 1961 to 1983, this is a wide-ranging presentation including several large canvases from the 70s and 80s and a series of early enamel on paper paintings. With much of this material having been rarely, if ever, shown, the emphasis is on the lesser-known aspects of Brown’s work.

 

Joan Brown was an astonishingly prolific artist with a successful career spanning some 30 plus years, up to her tragic death in India in 1990. Both highly individualistic and independent-minded, her work went through a series of dramatic and deeply personal evolutions over the course of her life. As an artist but also as a traveler and student, her views were shaped by an increasingly pluralistic embrace of world cultures and a spirituality which came to pervade her life and work. Though she respected and was inspired by painters such as Goya and Rembrandt, or more modern artists such as Rousseau and Bacon, Brown’s embrace of Eastern philosophies was of equal importance, in particular the teachings of the guru Sathya Sai Baba, of whom she became a devoted follower.

 

The exhibition begins with a group of enamel on paper paintings made during a trip to Spain in the summer of 1961, what was the first of many trips abroad for Brown. Loose and decadent, they read like a travelogue, documenting the sights in the same brushy strokes of her abstractions at the time. However, unlike those early paintings, these works on paper simply capture the people and places surrounding her, an approach more typical of her mature work. Similarly, her 1963 depiction of her young son in “Noel’s First Christmas” augments the extensive diaries she kept of his early years and is a richly colored and affectionate portrait.

 

At the core of the exhibition are paintings from 1973 to 1983. All large-scale and executed in enamel on canvas, they show Brown at her most experimental.  While they seem radical in relation to the exuberant patterning and saturated color more often associated with her work, the simplified elements in these paintings are in some ways a distillation of Brown’s practice. Her reductivism, of the figure in particular, relates to her training as a swimmer and the principle of efficient movement being the most ‘basic’. Therefore men and women are reduced down to silhouettes and outlines within spaces merely suggested at by a line or two within vast swaths of color. For Brown, this economy also allowed her to better capture gesture or emotion, what she saw to be at the core of what her paintings expressed. Yet there is also a parallel to her life-long interest in Egyptian art and iconography, where like pictographs, her simplified renderings become an alternative visual language. By eschewing extraneous details, her late paintings turn simplicity into a spiritual gesture.