Exhibition archive - Christopher Brown - Norton Museum of Art - West Palm Beach Florida

History and Memory: Paintings by Christopher Brown
3/30/1996 - 5/19/1996

This exhibition marks the first solo exhibition of the work of contemporary American artist, Christopher Brown, who lives and works in the California Bay Area. The exhibition includes 20 large-scale paintings representing over a decade of his artistic production, from 1982 to 1994.

Brown's canvases present anonymous figures, often in crowd scenes, walking the streets or floating in the water. His subjects are suffused by a velvety liquid lushness, and there is a quality of daydream and a suggestion of metamorphosis as the figures dissolve in the paint.

Brown is drawn to historical imagery and the power of collective memory. He often takes as his jumping off point images from photography, film and art history. Some of his sources include the famous Zapruder film of the Kennedy assassination, works by late nineteenth century American painters such as Thomas Eakins and photographs of the Gettysburg address.

Brown is not necessarily interested in capturing a particular person, event or time, but rather unleashes the power and essence of history and memory through a dizzying application of paint that evokes the way memories exist in our minds. The renowned contemporary art critic Michael Brenson has described Brown's paintings as a "world of profound gravity and unstoppable drift in which identity, memory and history are being formed and unformed at every moment, and everyone is both dreaming a narrative and an actor in someone else's dream."

The exhibition is organized by the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth Texas. The Norton is the only Florida venue for this exhibition.

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