New Paintings by Owen Brown

“It is not up to you to complete the work, but neither are you at liberty to desist from it.”
Isles Studios is pleased to present the first Minnesota exhibit of paintings by Owen Brown. Brown, for many years based in San Francisco, moved to Minneapolis in 2016. He has exhibited nationally, and his works are in collections in this country, Asia, and Europe.
Of late working as an abstractionist, in these images, Brown moves from a refocusing of the classic tropes of gesture and intervalic unity to a reframing of topical, communal narratives. Achieving a bonded whole both in formal armature and commitment to color, with the series of works presented here Brown summons a sense of animation both in process and social commitment.
Brown is equally concerned with orders of painterly control and randomness. Lush passages move from foreground to back, inflected or not, in a teasing of our attention. Implied in this watchfulness is an opening to vagaries of vision and visual thinking, and the demands required to hold to a statement in the midst of change. There is an order to Brown’s work, but it is one of a greater geography that requires a certain acceptance of chaos and an acknowledgment of contradiction. The history of these paintings is one of opposition: Fullness, then hunger.