William Brickel, Was It Ever Fair.

January 20 - March 2, 2024
Gallery 1 & 2

Michael Kohn Gallery is pleased to present Was It Ever Fair., an exhibition of new paintings by British artist, William Brickel. For his second solo exhibition with the gallery, Brickel presents a group of large-scale paintings and works on paper. The exhibition will be on view from January 20 through March 2, 2024.

In some ways all figurative work owes a debt to art history. Brickel’s paintings follow an illustrious path, from William Blake to the Pre-Raphaelites, to Stanley Spencer and Lucian Freud, as well as the rich tradition of English figuration. Yet, Brickel’s paintings have also been characterized as Mannerist, with figures in impossible contortions, sharing a 16th century sensibility derived from Italian artists like Pontormo and Giorgio Vasari. The strongest contemporary figurative painting distinguishes itself from the past as seen in the paintings of William Brickel.

In Was It Ever Fair., Brickel continues the depiction of himself as an everyman.  He is both the closely personal subject of his painting, and a symbol of anonymity.  The figure is markedly introspective and hard to decipher, but presented front and center on the canvas. Posed both in the interior and conversely in the outdoors, the figure is at ease yet cast in a highly unlikely position.  When multi-figured, Brickel’s personae resemble one another and present questions surrounding the recurrence of identity and its relation to people and the individual self.

Brickel’s subjects roam in environments generated from personal experience and memory. His compositions carry an emotional intensity that unfolds on the canvas through anatomically exaggerated, larger-than-life limbs. Echoing the concerns of 19th century Romantic English painters, Brickel’s figures question human intervention in nature and consider their own unnatural entanglement within it.

In his works on paper, Brickel fills the surface of the picture plane almost entirely with powerful depictions of human faces. The entirety of the human form is truncated, yet the emotive impact is still conveyed through details: a closed eye, a bent arm, a vertiginous perspective. Though smaller in size, Brickel’s colorful drawings share the same psychological weight.

 “I feel a sense of awe and belonging when nature finds its way to me untainted,” says Brickel. “This show examines the crossing of the industrial landscape and worked environment. I have chosen to concentrate on the personal within the environmental, how we are part of nature but we repeatedly scare it, and this makes its way into my paintings.”

The subtle and beautiful complexity of William Brickel’s paintings, both in subject matter and painterly prowess, identify Brickel as an important new voice in figurative painting.

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William Brickel, I'd Tell You If I Could

June 11 - July 31, 2021
Gallery 1 & 2

Kohn Gallery is pleased to announce the representation of London-based artist, William Brickel. On June 5th Brickel will be debuting I’d Tell You If I Could, his first solo exhibition with Kohn Gallery in Los Angeles. The exhibition will consist of large paintings and works on paper with an array of different mediums including: oil paint, charcoal, conté, and watercolor.

The figures in Brickel’s works are partly representations of himself, but are also standalone actors that perform and draw out an emotional distress and catharsis to which we are made witness. Brickel projects his face onto the visage of his subject matter. At once intimately personal and emotionally closed off, each figure is absorbed into the theatricality of their two-dimensional world, as the viewer is cognizant of their emotional intensity. For Brickel, these scenes are representations of his lived experience; each canvas is a window into a state of emotional vulnerability.

Brickel’s figures eschew the elegantly and highly self-conscious poses of his Mannerist predecessors as he creates works that elongate and exaggerate the human form beyond realism. His figures approach representation via a painterly restraint and emotional isolation that is reflective of his generation. Figures exist together in one picture plane, male bodies wrap around each other in an intimate double helix, but relationships are uncertain, and eye contact is never established. The figures are emotionally distant from each other and from the viewer, protecting themselves from the world we inhabit.

William Brickel’s works are drawn from recalled memories and imagination. Each scene is crafted from a past memory which preoccupies him, and canvases are outlined without photographic reference. In depicting the body, Brickel relies on his sense of touch to portray the human form, rather than its accurate, realistic depiction. Drawing influence from the conceptual manifesto of the Intimists of the 19th and 20th centuries, Brickel makes a distinction in the relationship between the human body and its spirit as two mutually inclusive agents which may also exist independently. The destiny and purpose of the body is to serve as an expressive device for the soul. 

Aesthetically Brickel finds kinship with British painters of the Interwar period. The oft-side profile figures, interest in two-dimensionality, color palette, and use of large expanses of flat color are reminiscent of British painters Edward Burra, Austin Osman Spare, Winifred Knight, and Stanley Spencer.

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