Adam Baumgold Gallery

Adam Baumgold gallery presents the exhibition “Roger Brown: Paintings,” from December 3rd to January 15th, 2005, his first solo exhibition in New York in ten years. Roger Brown (1941-1997) is recognized for his important contributions to the history of Chicago Art and to 20th century American art.

The exhibition will feature the painting “Buttermilk Sky,” 1974, that was also in the groundbreaking exhibition “Who Chicago?” in 1980. “Buttermilk Sky,” is a ravishing landscape "where clouds, hills, and vegetation are transformed into patterned forms. One of the artist’s recurring subjects, the vast presence of the Midwestern sky, is transformed into motifs whose patterning suggests endlessness, boredom, and mysterious forces that are equally hypnotic and haunting.“1 Also included in the exhibition is the luminous, prescient painting “The Decline and Fall of the American Empire,” 1985, a large diptych (72" x 96"), that shows "the institutional rip-offs of an over specialized society" as various people are being literally choked by different representatives of bureaucracy and government amidst Brown’s signature dark, silhouetted figures in yellow lit interiors. In all these works Roger Brown is a chronicler of the American landscape with an iconic, unique vision. The formal precedents of his work trace to many diverse sources, such as “Giovanni di Paolo, Giogio de Chirico, Edward Hopper, and Grant Wood, as well as vernacular architechture, Persian and Indian miniatures, comic strips, and naive and outsider art.”2

Roger Brown was born in Hamilton, Alabama in 1941. At the Art Institute of Chicago, Brown studied painting with Ray Yoshida and Whitney Halsted. His work was included in the exhibitions “The False Image,” at the Hyde Park Art Center in 1968 and “Who Chicago?” in 1970. Major retrospectives of Roger Brown’s work were exhibited at the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts in 1980 and at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. in 1987 that traveled to the Contemporary Art Museum in Houston and The Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago. Roger Brown’s work is in over 50 public collections worldwide, including the Museum of Modern Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and The Whitney Museum of American Art in New York: The Art Institute of Chicago, The Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago: The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, The National Museum of Art and The Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.

Gallery hours are Tuesday - Saturday 11:00 - 5:30 PM. The gallery will be closed from December 23 through January 1.

For further information please contact Adam Baumgold at 212-861-7338 or abaumgold@aol.com