Brian Alfred
Brian Alfred
Represented by Ameringer | McEnery | Yohe
New York, New York - Ameringer | McEnery | Yohe is pleased to announce that Brian Alfred is now represented by the gallery.
In his paintings, collages, and digital animations, Brian Alfred surveys the urban landscape and the barrage of sensory stimulation that confronts the contemporary individual on a daily basis.
Particularly inspired by society’s obsession with the digital age, Alfred browses the Internet, watches a constant stream of news, scours photography, architecture, video games, cartoons, propaganda, and just about any available form of digital media to source material. Employing Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop, the artist uses his computer as an artistic tool, along with an X-ACTO blade, tape, and a ruler, to manipulate found images. He creates collages and paintings by building them up, layer by layer, with both clean, stenciled edges and loose transparent washes, to achieve a bold simplicity. He also uses the collages and digital drawings as a starting point for creating animations that he thinks of as moving paintings.
Understanding that a face or a building can be emblematic of much more, Alfred employs culturally relevant visual cues to propose the amorphous environment of contemporary culture. He cites everything from Exxon signs and celebrity faces to the sprawl of a city or a collection of wires and abandoned computers. Invoking an unsettling mixture of paranoia, danger, beauty, devastation, progress, and defeat in this post-industrial landscape, Alfred renders the ambiguous nature of the modern world.
Brian Alfred was born in 1974 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He received his Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in 1997 from Pennsylvania State University and his Master of Fine Arts degree in 1999 from Yale University.
He has had numerous solo exhibitions nationally and internationally. Recent solo exhibitions include "Storms and Stress," Hezi Cohen Gallery, Tel Aviv, Israel; "It’s Already the End of the World," Frist Center for Visual Art, Nashville, TN; "Co-op," Giraud Pissarro Ségalot, New York, NY; "Rise Above," Haunch of Venison, London, England; "It’s Already the End of the World," Haunch of Venison, New York, NY; "Majic Window," Studio La Città, Verona, Italy; "Millions Now Living Will Never Die!!!," Haunch of Venison, Berlin, Germany; "Global Warmings," SCAI the Bathhouse, Tokyo, Japan; "Surveillance," Haunch of Venison, Zurich, Switzerland; "Space is the Place!," Mary Boone Gallery, New York, NY; "The Future is Now!," Phoenix Art Museum, Phoenix, AZ; and "Overload," Max Protetch Gallery, New York, NY.
Recent group exhibitions include "Uncanny Congruencies," Palmer Museum of Art, Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA; "Videosphere: A New Generation," Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY; "Me, Undoubtedly. 1309 Faces," Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, Wolfsburg, Germany; "Aichi Triennale," Aichi Prefectural Museum of Art, Nagoya, Japan; "Surface Tension," South Bend Museum of Art, South Bend, IN; "New Art for a New Century: Contemporary Acquisitions 2000 – 2010," Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach, CA; "Teaching An Old Dog New Tricks," Den Frie Udstillingsbygning (Den Frie Center of Contemporary Art), Copenhagen, Denmark; "The Shapes of Space," Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY; "American Academy of Arts and Letters Invitational Exhibition," American Academy of Arts and Letters, New York, NY; "Radar: Selections from the Kent and Vicki Logan Collection," Denver Art Museum, Denver, CO; "Metropolis," National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Australia; and "Digital Showcase," Austin Museum of Digital Art, Austin, TX.
His work may be found in the permanent collections of the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY; Denver Art Museum, Denver, CO; Montclair Art Museum, Montclair, NJ; National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Australia; Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach, CA; Phoenix Museum of Art, Phoenix, AZ; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY.
Alfred is the recipient of the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant, the Excellence Award from the Japan Media Arts Festival, Pennsylvania State University Alumni Achievement Award, Joan Mitchell Foundation Award, American Academy of Arts and Letters Purchase Award, Pennsylvania State University Alumni Award, New York Foundation of the Arts Inspiration Award, Phelps Berdan Memorial Award, Skowhegan Match Scholarship, and the Edwin Zoller Scholarship.
Brian Alfred lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.