Headshot credit: Artist
Episode 86 features Coady Brown. She is a painter from Baltimore, MD. She received her BFA from Tyler School of Art, Temple University in 2012 and her MFA from Yale University in 2016. Her recent solo exhibitions include Only In The Darkness Can You See The Stars at Shulamit Nazarian in Los Angeles and Electric Bloom at Taymour Grahne in London. She has exhibited both nationally and internationally with 1969 Gallery, Carl Kostyál, Richard Heller, and Francios Ghebaly, among others. She is the recipient of several fellowships and residencies including The Fine Arts Work Center, Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Fountainhead, Vermont Studio Center, and the Yale/Norfolk School of Art. Her work has been written about in The New York Times, The Village Voice, Juxtapoz, and New American Painting. Brown’s works are in the permanent collections of the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, the Columbus Museum of Art, and the X Museum in Beijing, China. Brown currently lives and works in Philadelphia, PA.
Brown’s work examines how groups, couples, and solitary figures explore self-presentation in both private and public life. Bodies inhabit tightly framed, intimate spaces in paintings that expose our vulnerabilities and the tenuous nature of our connections and relationships. Figures become reflections of their environments, mirroring these heightened, surreal, frenetic, sexy, and sorrowful states. Patterns are painted in contrasting, high-chroma colors. Flowers, faces, and geometric shapes adorn jackets and t-shirts, allowing clothing to become an extension of the psyche. In their contrasting flatness and opticality, bodies are trapped in a world that is both familiar and strange. Figures tend to be androgynous, understanding gender fluidly and that femininity can be a site of both strength and extreme vulnerability. Caught in various states of harmony, anxiety, ecstasy, and anguish, figures navigate the world and uncertainty of the everyday, from intimate boundaries in bars and bedrooms to the unknown that awaits outside.. It is a world fraught with the instability and paranoia of contemporary life.
Confidante
72in x 60in
2021
Despite The Divine
60in x 56in
2021
Electric Bloom
60in x 56in
2021
Make Believe
42in x 36in
2021
