(Los Angeles 1951–2020)
Head-Winter, 1984, signed and dated on the reverse, oil, enamel, pencil on canvas with red wood and copper nails, 153x 138 cm

Provenance:
Tony Shafrazi Gallery, New York (label on the reverse)
Phillips de Pury & Company, New York, 12 May 2006, lot 175
Private Collection, USA

After working in Paris during the 1970’s Brown became associated with a group of artists in New York who collectively formed a radical group known as Frontier Art at the beginning of the 80s and included Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring. The group reflected the need for a new aesthetic dimension that would be more metropolitan, that would not so much renew the traditional language of painting as define a new expressive reality. They had originally rejected any link, even one of conflict, with any conventional form of artistic expression, in an attempt to define what was real by rejecting the filter of art. Brown was a leading member of this group who received enormous critical acclaim and became highly influential during this period. Together they sought to accomplish the renewal of the language of abstraction, and thus to recover the feeling of transcendence - to reconsecrate abstraction.

Brown was fascinated by ethnography and the use of signs and symbols in primitive cultures, and through his work developed a powerful and mysterious language of iconography, using symbols alluding to the ascetic ideas of solitude and mediation. In creating his work, he rejected the conventional limits of art materials, and introduced raw materials and objets trouvés in a fresh challenging aesthetic. Head-Winter is an iconic example of his artistic output from the 1980s. (…)

In 1980 he was invited by Keith Haring to exhibit in Club 57 New York, where he attracted the attention of the influential gallery owner, Shafrazi, who would prove highly important in championing Brown as a leading member of Frontier Art giving him a one-man show in 1983. Other solo exhibitions followed at Larry Gagosian Gallery and Leo Castelli Gallery. Brown also continued to exhibit extensively throughout the world (…).In later years Brown lived in Mexico where he continued to paint, as well as setting up the poignantly named creative publishing house Carpe Diem Press in Oaxaca. He died tragically with his wife in a car accident in February 2020, in Mexico.

The artist is now represented in many major museum collections of modern art including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Whitney Museum, New York; Musée Pompidou, Paris; Tamayo Museum, Mexico City.

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