James Brown

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Studio d’Arte Raffaelli presents an overview of the work of one of the artists with whom he has collaborated for the longest time, the American James Brown, who from the 1980s to today has gone through continuous phases of experimentation, from graffiti, to primitive art, to totemic sculpture, to abstraction. The title of the exhibition “A Long Story” refers both to the long bond between the artist and the gallery, and to the narrative component – constantly changing – present in the works of James Brown, right from the first works, in which the artist was approached to Basquiat, Keith Haring and Kenny Scharf.

If in its initial phase the figuration played a fundamental role, in the form of hieratic two-dimensional portraits, towards the mid-1980s the painting of James Brown becomes more material and spiritual, placing a shamanic conjunction between human and divine being, which continues until the most recent works.
In the series of works “Opus contra Naturam” (in exhibition at the GAM in San Marino in 2003), James Brown turns his attention to materials, using collage combined with painting. It is a period full of references to travel and world cultures, in which Brown retrieves ancient anthropological models and reworks them according to a coherent and rigorous aesthetic. This phase precedes the most recent, intense series of works: it is the research on the sky, on the motion of the stars, on eclipses, visualized by the artist as a multisensiorial phenomenon starting from the summer of 1999.

The founding stages of the path of James Brown are investigated in this exhibition at the Studio d’Arte Raffaelli – his reference gallery in Italy – through a long exhibition history, a sort of monograph aimed at returning the meaningful portrait of an artist who has always moved with discretion, whose international value has been widely recognized by exhibitions and projects in prestigious Italian venues such as the GAM in Turin, the MAGI ¹900 in Bologna, and the Oaxaca Museum of Contemporary Art – just to name a few.

The exhibition will be open in the gallery from Tuesday, December 17, 2019 to March 31, 2020.