Press Release from Modern Artist’s Gallery. Written by Katie Newman, MA FineArt Valuation.
THE SILENT BUZZ SURROUNDING MICHAEL BROWN
It is refreshing to encounter an artist whose work is utterly unique in approach yet maintains an edgy and challenging content. It is particularly exciting when the artist is young and in the early stages of developing a technique which already displays great confidence in a variety of mediums. Modern Artists Gallery, Berkshire is currently staging a mini exhibition of the recently discovered young artist, Michael Brown and it is creating quite a buzz.
To be submerged in to the world of Michael Brown is both unsettling and comical. Using beeswax as his primary medium, Brown has created a group of work which cannot fail to engage his audience. The most powerful is ‘Hitcher’ loosely based on a homeless character whom the artist befriended. The paper-thin layers of wax are modelled to create a life-size bust which appears so fragile and yet resounds powerfully with the sitter’s melancholy story. A further wax bust entitled ‘Mo’ hints more strongly at the humour which runs through Brown’s work. The artists’s friend ‘Mo’ stares out at the viewer from behind large silver sunglasses in a challenging and slightly mocking manner. Inspired by the demise of the honey bee in the UK, ‘Honey I’m Doomed’ offers an intriguing piece of wall art which seems to bridge the often impossible divide between period and contemporary installation. A large honeycomb backdrop provides haven for tiny costumed figures precariously balanced and hanging on for dear life. One feels that this piece would seem at home in an 18th Century timbered cottage as in a minimal 21st Century environment.
The exhibition continues with a selection of drawings and collages by the artist. The layered mixed media collages depict ambiguous spaces, assembled with subtlety, to reveal the atmosphere of an experienced place, in traces of torn newspaper, faint figures, and delicate relief. These spaces reinvent themselves into an intriguing, almost dreamlike impression of a subconscious other-world. It is upon inspecting these that the viewer becomes more aware of this ‘other-world’ which occupies the artist and his work. It is unsurprising, at this point, to learn that Michael Brown is deaf.
His work has attracted a large number of commissions in the local area, but Michael Brown has yet to break in to the national and international art market, but is only a matter of time before word is spread about this talented and original young man. Perhaps the present exhibition of his work may be a springboard for the recognition he deserves.
‘The Silent Timepiece’ an exhibition of sculpture and paintings by Michael Brown will be on exhibition at Modern Artists Gallery from 14th March – 26th April 2011. Please contact the gallery for opening hours or see the website www.modernartistsgallery.com.
Source: Modern Artists Gallery.
Artist Details: Modern Artists Gallery.