Rebecca Brown
Spike
June 29 – August 31, 2025
Rebecca Brown, Turning Point, 2025, Acrylic gouache and pastel on birch panel, 6 × 6 inches
Rebecca Brown’s Spike, is a work of interior stagecraft, paintings as waypoints in the artist’s psychic landscape—from a lonely spray of water arching out of a still green sea to the Looney Tunes orange spiral of a clay pigeon, a motif from Brown’s childhood in Kentucky. These paintings blend the graphic immediacy of animation cels with an a quiet surrealist uncanny. Drawing equally from Billy Al Bengston’s crisp, funny formalism and Magritte’s dreamlike tableaux, Brown freezes locations and visions that hover between recognition and abstraction. A graduate of ArtCenter College of Design with a BFA in Illustration, Brown approaches painting with a designer’s eye for distillation and an animator’s love of bold silhouettes (from “The Simpsons” to Sleeping Beauty). Her process begins with swift, concise sketches that preserve the urgency of a moment, followed by meticulous small-brush work. The paintings in Spike invite viewers to reconstruct narratives from these deliberate fragments.
