I am a pretty big fan of Deborah Brown’s gallery Storefront,
which is easily one of the most consistent galleries in Brooklyn with Jenny
Vogel’s video they showed last summer of an inexplicably free floating black
stone in a modernist parking garage was easily the best piece of art I’ve ever
seen in Brooklyn. Being that Brown is an impressive gallerist, I had suspicions
that her art was sub-par in the same way that Jerry Saltz always joking about
his early years as a painter. But I have to say, I was pleasantly surprised by
the quality of Brown’s large show at the ACTIVE space. Which for a Brooklyn is
huge and a tip of the hat to the ACTIVE space for having an expansive solo show
to break up the never-ending stream of group and occasional two person shows
that overwhelm Brooklyn. Brown’s large, vibrantly colored paintings more than
hold up in the space with little bits of cars and piles of scrap metal rendered
in soft mushy strokes of gray that at their best when border on the abstract. This
allows the debris to suggest foreign conflicts or an apocalyptic setting and
not the romanticized vision many have of the old Bushwick, before Luhring
Augustine and the young fashionable people, or I guess depending on your age,
before Roberta’s or white people. However you want to see the bits of
representation in Brown’s painting, it is hard to deny the woman knows color
and her just-shy-of-florescent color palate radiates like a non-stop sunset at
the end of the world.
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