Joan Brown. Facts & Fantasies.

About

Matthew Marks is pleased to announce Joan Brown: Facts & Fantasies, the next exhibition in his gallery at 522 West 22nd Street. The first one-person Joan Brown exhibition at the gallery, it features several works that were included in the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s acclaimed retrospective this past fall.

Joan Brown (1938-1990) is known for her large-scale, autobiographical paintings inspired by her personal experiences and informed by her multifarious interests. Brown gained national recognition at the age of twenty for her thickly-impastoed, gestural oil paintings. Despite her early success, in 1964 she intentionally stopped exhibiting to pursue a different direction in her work. In 1967, she debuted a radically different style marked by a graphic directness, which she would expand upon for the rest of her career.

Joan Brown: Facts & Fantasies focuses on Brown’s mature style and features paintings, sculptures, and drawings made between 1971 and 1986. The exhibition’s title is borrowed from Brown’s own description of her work: "Facts and fantasies. Facts such as travel situations, everyday situations, sitting on a bed and looking out the window; and then fantasy — fantasy travels, fantasy rooms in restaurants and so on.” The works on view include portraits of the artist and her son, imagined scenes abroad, and paintings inspired by art history and ancient cultures. Brown’s compositions are filled with humor and playfulness — “half and half, fact and fantasy.” With this balance, Brown’s work addresses universal experience at its core: “I hope that viewers are able to share or identify with the things that I talk about, because I really feel that I paint the human condition; that’s what I try to do.”

Joan Brown’s paintings were included in the 1964 Carnegie International in Pittsburgh and the 1972 and 1977 Whitney Biennials in New York, and her work was the subject of one-person exhibitions at the San Francisco Museum of Art in 1971 and the Berkeley Art Museum in 1974 and 1998. The most substantial exhibition of her work since her untimely death in 1990 was recently organized by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and will be on view at the Carnegie Museum of Art this summer before traveling to the Orange County Museum of Art in early 2024.