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Brian Alfred
ESCAPE PLAN
17 March - 23 April 2022
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Miles McEnery Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of recent works by Brian Alfred. The artist’s fifth solo exhibition with the gallery, Escape Plan, will open on 17 March at 511 West 22nd Street and remain on view through 23 April 2022. The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated publication featuring an essay by Stephen Westfall.
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Brian AlfredAmazon, 2021Acrylic on canvas30 x 24 inches
76.2 x 61 cm"The past couple of years were full of anxiety, worry, introspection, and the unknown. The work in this exhibition is born out of that environment. Filled with images of the reality of our global situation coupled with images of imagined escape, peace and calm. The group of images play with a dichotomy of feeling trapped and great escape."
- Brian Alfred
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Brian AlfredEmpty Airport, 2021Acrylic on canvas50 x 60 inches
127 x 152.4 cm"It was important that the images don’t point too specifically in a direction. I want the viewers to feel taken on a journey of ups and downs, beauty and fear, meditation and rumination, calm and stress. This was where my mind was over the time making the work and I want that to come through to the viewer."
- Brian Alfred
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Brian AlfredFire Sky, 2021Acrylic on canvas62 x 72 inches
157.5 x 182.9 cm"In "Fire Sky," the vapors are smoke rather than mist and are created in washes guided by a foam brush. These clouds stem from an ominously illuminated central vanishing point to the right of the red sun that billows into the foreground space of advancing, still-forested ridges and the dark mass of a modernist house with long, blacked-out, but reflective picture windows, which is at an oblique perspectival angle to the picture plane. The blankness of the house and windows imply that its owners have either evacuated the area or are otherwise absent as smoke fills the vale. The empty lap pool heightens the sense of geometric intrusion into a natural landscape."
- Stephen Westfall in "Uncanny Absences"
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Brian AlfredMeditation Field, 2021Acrylic on canvas
50 x 60 inches
127 x 152.4 cm"In "Meditation Field," and "Little Red Ridge," the yellow and red skies, respectively, make an enfolding color statement that draws clouds and sun into the pattern. The foreground flowers in "Meditation Field" induce an animated motion through gracefully undulating stem lines, while the flying pair of ducks in silhouette, heading stage left, establish a perpendicular gesture above the vertically reaching foreground tree line. Alfred’s paintings often have an implied gesture of movement: the wheeling pan described by "Test Site" and "Empty Airport," or the linear undulations and angles of "Meditation Field" and "Little Red Ridge."
- Stephen Westfall in "Uncanny Absences"
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Brian AlfredRed Ridge, 2021Acrylic on canvas70 x 80 inches
177.8 x 203.2 cm -
Brian AlfredThe Great Falls, 2021Acrylic on canvas72 x 180 inches
182.9 x 457.2 cm -
"Alfred’s paintings and videos are seemingly serene explorations of a pictorial tradition of flatness (in the portrayal of landscape and city life from the street)—a tradition that extends back to Ukiyo-e prints and the resulting Japonisme movement in nineteenth-century France, and forward through such contemporary iterations as the paintings of Allan D’Arcangelo and Alex Katz."
- Stephen Westfall in "Uncanny Absences"
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Brian AlfredUpstate, 2021Acrylic on canvas14 x 11 inches
35.6 x 27.9 cm"All the surfaces of his paintings are readable in their location of sequence of application; you can follow the taped-off and cut edges and peer through the veils. Step back, and the image clicks together, then the planes start to move like rows of targets in a carnival shooting gallery."
- Stephen Westfall in "Uncanny Absences"
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Brian Alfred in his Studio, 2021, Brooklyn, NY.
BRIAN ALFRED (b. 1974 in Pittsburgh, PA) received his Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in 1997 from Pennsylvania State University and his Master of Fine Arts degree in 1999 from Yale University.
Recent solo exhibitions include “High Rises and Double Vision: Images of New York,” Miles McEnery Gallery, New York, NY; “Future Shock,” Miles McEnery Gallery, New York, NY; “Techno Garden,” Maho Kubota Gallery, Tokyo, Japan; “New Animations,” Hezi Cohen Gallery, Tel Aviv, Israel; “Beauty in Danger,” Salon 94 Video Wall, New York, NY; “It’s Already the End of the World,” Frist Center for Visual Art, Nashville, TN; “Co-op,” Giraud Pissarro Ségalot, New York, NY, and “Rise Above,” Haunch of Venison, London, United Kingdom.
Recent group exhibitions include “Transformed: Objects Reimagined by American Artists,” Montclair Art Museum, Montclair, NJ; “Do You Think it Needs a Cloud,” Miles McEnery Gallery, New York, NY; “Fixed Contained,” Kotaro Nukaga Gallery, Tokyo, Japan; “Door Into Summer / M’s collection +,” Maho Kubota Gallery, Tokyo, Japan; “Rag & Bone Mural,” Houston Street, New York, NY; “Art on Link,” Art on LINK/NYC Kiosks, New York, NY; “Belief in Giants,” Miles McEnery Gallery, New York, NY; “The Frame,” Samsung Art TV, Samsung, USA; “Like Oxygen,” Mountain Gallery, Brooklyn, NY; “Room with a view,” EDDYSROOM, Brooklyn, NY; and “Audacious: Contemporary Artists Speak Out,” Denver Art Museum, Denver, CO.
His work is included in the collections of the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY; Cleveland Clinic Art Foundation Program, Lyndhurst, OH; Denver Art Museum, Denver, CO; Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse, NY; Musuem of Fine Arts, Houston, Houston, TX; Montclair Art Museum, Montclair, NJ; National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Australia; New Britain Museum of American Art, New Britain, CT; Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach, CA; Phoenix Museum of Art, Phoenix, AZ; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY; University Museum of Contemporary Art, University of Massachusetts at Amherst, Amherst, MA; Weisman Art Museum, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN; Wellmark Blue Cross Blue Shield Corporate Art Collection, Des Moines, IA, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY.
Alfred is the recipient of the College of Art & Architecture Faculty Research Grant, Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA; Institute for the Arts and Humanities Individual Faculty Grant, Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA; Jerome Foundation Grant, St. Paul, MN; CarriageHouse Arts Residency, Islip, NY; Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant, New York, NY; Excellence Award, Japan Media Arts Festival, Tokyo, Japan; Pennsylvania State University Alumni Achievement Award, University Park, PA; Joan Mitchell Foundation Award, New York, NY; and American Academy of Arts and Letters Purchase Award, New York, NY.
Brian Alfred lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.
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Brian AlfredAmazon, 2021Acrylic on canvas30 x 24 inches
76.2 x 61 cm -
Brian AlfredCampfire Escape, 2021Acrylic on canvas14 x 11 inches
35.6 x 27.9 cm -
Brian AlfredCity Lights Sunset Sky, 2021Acrylic on canvas20 x 24 inches
50.8 x 61 cm -
Brian AlfredCoastal Escape, 2021Acrylic on canvas74 x 62 inches
188 x 157.5 cm
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Brian AlfredEmpty Airport, 2021Acrylic on canvas50 x 60 inches
127 x 152.4 cm -
Brian AlfredEmpty Office, 2021Acrylic on canvas14 x 11 inches
35.6 x 27.9 cm -
Brian AlfredFire Sky, 2021Acrylic on canvas62 x 72 inches
157.5 x 182.9 cm -
Brian AlfredLand(e)scape, 2021Acrylic on canvas20 x 24 inches
50.8 x 61 cm
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Brian AlfredLittle Red Ridge, 2021Acrylic on canvas20 x 16 inches
50.8 x 40.6 cm -
Brian AlfredMeditation Field, 2021Acrylic on canvas
50 x 60 inches
127 x 152.4 cm -
Brian AlfredModerna, 2021Acrylic on canvas72 1/2 x 60 inches
184.2 x 152.4 cm -
Brian AlfredPfizer, 2021Acrylic on canvas70 x 60 inches
177.8 x 152.4 cm
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Brian AlfredRed Ridge, 2021Acrylic on canvas70 x 80 inches
177.8 x 203.2 cm -
Brian AlfredRodeo, 2021Acrylic on canvas50 x 60 inches
127 x 152.4 cm -
Brian AlfredSnowy View, 2021Acrylic on canvas40 x 30 inches
101.6 x 76.2 cm -
Brian AlfredTest Site, 2021Acrylic on canvas50 x 60 inches
127 x 152.4 cm
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Brian AlfredThe Field Code, 2021Acrylic on canvas70 x 80 inches
177.8 x 203.2 cm -
Brian AlfredThe Great Falls, 2021Acrylic on canvas72 x 180 inches
182.9 x 457.2 cm -
Brian AlfredThe Park, 2021Acrylic on canvas24 x 20 inches
61 x 50.8 cm -
Brian AlfredUpstate, 2021Acrylic on canvas14 x 11 inches
35.6 x 27.9 cm
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