Roger Brown: La Conchita

Opening Reception: Saturday, November 10, 5-7pm 

On Saturday November 10, at the opening of the auction preview, remarks about the La Conchita collection will take place at 4 pm at Leslie Hindman Auctioneers at 1338 West Lake Street, immediately followed by the exhibition opening at 5 pm at Kavi Gupta's Elizabeth St. location

This exhibition coincides with the Leslie Hindman Auctioneers auction of property from Brown’s La Conchita, California collection on November 15, 2018 at 6:00 pm. 

Kavi Gupta is pleased to present Roger Brown: La Conchita.

This unique exhibition will offer viewers the rare opportunity to examine the contents of the Southern California home of Roger Brown (b.1941—d.1997). Brown, seeking a new place to work in a warmer climate, built his "temple of painting" at La Conchita, California, commissioning Stanley Tigerman to design the new home. After the house was completed in 1993, Brown quickly applied his disciplines to organizing the space, bringing his eye to new works as well as the accumulation of objects arranged with precise aesthetic intent. This presentation features multiple facet’s of Brown’s late career developments, examining the formal relationships between Brown’s iconic painting practice, innovative Virtual Still Life sculpture/paintings, and his assemblage arrangements all created during his time in La Conchita. The elusive Virtual Still Life series, produced entirely during this late stage in his life, blurred the lines between his paintings and his habit of collection, and draws attention to how his carefully arranged assemblages of found objects relate to his creative output. 
 

Brown is renowned today as one of the founders and primary influencers in the famed Chicago Imagist group. The aesthetic position for which Brown is renowned uses a pop aesthetic to investigate a range of socio-political issues. His trademark silhouettes and curvilinear landscapes depict both the topical and uncomfortable.

Brown’s work is of startling contemporary relevance, cleverly approaching many topics from the natural and built environment, disaster, religion, the art world, popular culture, art history, eroticism, and socio-political concerns from modern warfare to mortality during the HIV/AIDS crisis. Rich in content and innovative in methods of depiction, Brown presaged the subjective and surreal figuration seen in many threads of recent painting.

During his lifetime, art dealer Phyllis Kind was Brown’s exclusive representative, and she was the first to exhibit hs work in 1971. Brown’s career abounded with solo and group shows internationally, and notable retrospectives of his work were shown by the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts in 1980, and at the Hirshhorn Museum in 1987. The Roger Brown Study Collection, maintained by the School of the Art Institute of Chicago with curator Lisa Stone, makes Brown’s prolific art collection and archive available to the public. Brown’s political paintings were recently featured at DC Moore Gallery, New York and his Virtual Still Life works were highlighted in a solo exhibition at Maccarone, New York. Brown received his BFA and his MFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. The artist’s work is included in notable private and public collections including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Museum of Modern Art, The Whitney Museum of American Art, The Art Institute of Chicago, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, Los Angeles County Museum, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, National Gallery of Art, and The National Portrait Gallery. A longtime resident of Chicago, Brown divided his time between Chicago and New Buffalo, MI, and in the 1980s he began wintering in La Conchita, CA. He is the subject of Roger Brown: Virtual Still Life at the Museum of Arts and Design in 2019. 

Top image: Roger Brown, Virtual Still Life #11: Mugs and Mountains, 1995, Oil on canvas and mixed media, 26” x 37 1/2” x 9”.​