Gallery 16 is pleased to announce our second exhibition with artist Jason Middlebrook, At The End Of The Day. This is the first West Coast solo show by the California native since 2016. His work has been the subject of major exhibitions and public projects around the world, including the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, the Broad Art Museum and Site Santa Fe. The exhibition will include new towering geometric sculptures and his signature cross cut wood wall works. The new sculptures are a departure for Middlebrook. The black, powder-coated steel pieces tower eight to ten feet in height. Those familiar with his work, will recognize the new sculptures as dimensional realizations of painted elements from his plank paintings. The geometric patterns that have adorned most of Middlebrooks work over the past decade, become realized as free standing works.
Middlebrook has long been interested in man’s complex and often adversarial relationship with nature. The straight lines and precise angles in his paintings lay over the historical rings of the tree. “My work is broken into two parts, the first is a skin that I lay over the top of nature, somewhat like a sidewalk or a parking lot. The skin is just visiting, it’s covering but respecting the borders it has been given. The borders in my case are the shapes of trees, the trunks and limbs are what I choose to make paintings on, the paintings become the skin. I respond to the compression of time and the organic shape that has grown, I respond to the order of the tree and the form that it became. The second aspect of my work is my reaction and interpretation of nature. In all cases the grain and the shape of wood dictate the direction of the painting which always starts with multiple drawings.
Jason Middlebrook lives and works in Hudson, New York. Middlebrook has mounted solo exhibitions at a number of institutions, including the New Museum (New York), the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum (Connecticut), and the Santa Monica Museum of Art. His work is included in the permanent collections of Addison Gallery of American Art, Andover, MA; Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY; Altoids Collection, New York, NY; Arthouse, Austin, TX; British Airways Art Collection, Waterside, United Kingdom; Denver Art Museum, Denver, CO; Harn Museum, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL; Marte Museum, San Salvador, El Salvador; Microsoft Corporate Art Collection, Redmond, WA; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, IL; Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; NASA Art Program, Washington, D.C.; New Museum, New York, NY; Pacific Bell, San Francisco, CA; Progressive Art Collection, Mayfield, OH; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY
