Patrick Brown is a trained artist living in Southern California. His new work is large format abstractions, heavy with textures and multiple layers of oil in the style of abstract expressionists reminiscent of Mark Rothko, Willem De Kooning and Adolph Gottlieb. Brown’s work is purely abstract but imbued with a deeply felt humanism--a sense of the sublime--derived from his own struggles living with HIV/AIDS. While Brown’s work does not directly address the AIDS crisis or his own health, the subtext is always present. His work is similar in aim to the work of Ross Bleckner, whose dark paintings with floating images evoke memory or loss, functioning as memento mori to those lost in the AIDS epidemic. Like Bleckner, Brown creates paintings that invite contemplation rather than confrontation--a kind of visual slow release, drawing the viewer close and revealing their formal complexity over time.
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