Roger Brown, “Virtual Still Life”

Brown (1941–1997) was most closely associated with the Chicago Imagist school, which began in the 1960s with a group of Windy City artists who pursued eccentric, genre-defying approaches to representation that borrowed from comic books and folk art, and also employed punchy colors and graphics. A southerner by birth, Brown’s work demonstrated all of these pictorial tics with vivid stylized compositions that often featured city scenes and landscapes. These were depicted as repeating motifs at once flattened and shaded with transitional effects resembling airbrush. His paintings evoked wallpaper, Art Deco, Pop Art and Outsider Art in one fell swoop, and his themes frequently touched on the denatured, monotonous quality of modern life. This show present a late-career series of largely abstract canvases abutted by shelves lined with assortments of thrift-store ceramics. Meant to contrast the concrete world with then emerging phenomenon of virtual reality, these painting also speak to Brown’s passion for collecting.