Featured Works

Brian Alfred's work is featured in the exhibition City, Country, Connectivity at the Kunst für Angeln e.V.

Brian Alfred featured in an interview with Shoutout LA. 

Brian Alfred in conversation with Maria Vogel in Hii Magazine.

Brian Alfred discusses his new book Why I Make Art in Widewalls.

Brian Alfred's latest exhibition ponders an Earth void of humans

8 Fascinating New York Gallery Shows to See in April 2022

Brian Alfred interviewed on the podcast Art Sense.

I remember the first time I saw Jo Baer’s painting ‘H. Arcuata’. It wasn’t at a museum or gallery; it was the same kind of encounter I had with most art that hit me as an undergraduate at Penn State University. It was in a magazine. Even in print the painting knocked me out. It was so unlike any other work I had seen up until that time. It was painted three years before I was born in 1971. The stretcher was just deep enough to separate it from the depth of a normal canvas. This seemed a purposeful choice to make the painting more sculptural in its read. 

It’s another unseasonably warm winter day in New York City. Tuesday February 13th, early evening and dark out. It’ll be in the 50’s tomorrow and in the 60’s the day after. I’m trying to remember if I’ve ever experienced such a warm February in NYC. There’s an unsettling mist and fog in the air as I weave through end of the day rush hour hordes of people – many bumping into each other as they walk with illuminated faces absorbed in their handheld screens. The pedestrian crowd dissipates as I walk through Chelsea and finally step into Miles McEnery Gallery to meet up with artist Brian Alfred for a look and talk about his current one-person show of 15 paintings and one animated video projection.

By Brian Boucher

What the Gallery Says: “Taking its title from Alvin Toffler’s 1970 novel and Herbie Hancock’s 1983 album, Brian Alfred’s Future Shock embraces both of their messages and expands upon them. Toffler warns of an impending information overload as well as humanity’s inability to adapt to the ever-increasing speed of industry and consumerism. Alternatively, Hancock’s album welcomes the so-called information overload, praising the expansion of musical possibilities brought on by technology.”

Issue 02 of AUGUST Journal, the New York issue. Featuring stories on Massimo and Lella Vignelli's apartment, Alanna Heiss's loft, Joe Baum's restaurants; with texts, photographs, and artworks by Pilar Viladas, Wendy Goodman, Matt Tyrnauer, Alix Browne, Ricky Clifton, Jason Schmidt, François Dischinger, Ngoc Minh Ngo, Martyn Thompson, Andrew Zuckerman, Matthew Johnston, Marc Yankus, Jean-Philippe Delhomme, Mel Odom, and many other grand New York legends.

Donald Taglialatella is pleased to announce that on Friday, 27 October, from 1 to 3pm, he will host a happening at his World House Editions stand, #102, at the IFPDA Print Fair in New York City. Dubbed The ARTpin Project and curated by painter and video animation artist, Brian Alfred, artists EJ Hauser (American, b.1967), Nathan Carter (American, b.1970) and Brian Alfred (American, b.1974) have each offered artwork for two limited edition pins and will be on hand at the World House Editions stand to give away these pins created for The Print Fair.  This project is the first in a series of ARTpin projects that World House Editions will be collaborating on with artists.

Questions by Emily Burns

Thanks so much for taking the time to chat about your work and recent projects. Congrats on the recent showing of your animation Chromacity at Art Basel in Miami. The projection was 7,000-square-feet on the exterior wall of the Frank Gehry-designed New World Center in Miami Beach, Florida. Is that the largest projection of your work at this point? What is it like to have your work in such a highly visible, publicized space, in such a big way?

Thanks. Yeah, I suppose that’s the biggest I have ever had my animations projected. I love having the work in public places. There’s such a different feel and reaction to it than in the gallery. I’m so happy when my work is able to reach beyond the gallery-goer and to the person on the street who may not be intending to see art during their day. I’ve been fortunate enough to show the animations in places like Times Square, Eventi Plaza, Sundance and even on buildings in Australia. To me, it’s very exciting for my work to be seen in such diverse places. 

EDDYSROOM is pleased to announce the opening of its eleventh show: Room With A View. Room With A View is a group show of landscape/nature-themed works. We are excited to include the works of Erik Parker, Hein Koh, Shara Hughes, Cody Hudson, Kevin McNamee-Tweed, Hilary Baldwin, and Brian Alfred in the exhibition.

Now this is art that truly takes you places. Touted as "the world’s fastest art experience," the high-speed Genbi Shinkansen opened last month on the Jōetsu Shinkansen railway line.

Japan’s major passenger railway company JR East has just launched what officials call “the world’s fastest art experience” with a traveling art gallery aboard one of its bullet trains, or shinkansen. Zipping at speeds up to 200 miles per hour, a train named “Genbi Shinkansen” on the Jōetsu Shinkansen line now holds a group exhibition of contemporary works by six Japanese artists, the Japanese collective Paramodel, and New York-based artist Brian Alfred.

You may have admired contemporary art on solid ground, but have you ever done that on a moving train?

Art lovers will now have the opportunity of doing exactly that.

Japan’s Genbi Shinkansen, a “contemporary art bullet train,” has hit the rails today in all its “artful” glory.  

Brian Alfred's City Sunrise, 2004, will be on exhibition in the Denver Art Museum's reinstallation of the Modern & Contemporary galleries. Audacious: Contemporary Artists Speak Out officially opens to the public February 21, 2016 and will be on view through February 2017.

From 4 July to 27 September, at Hotel des Arts in Toulon, you can visit the exhibition VILLISSIMA. Des artistes et des villes which will exhibit some works by the artist Brian Alfred and Hema Upadhyay. The exhibition, curated by Guillaume Monsaingeon, becomes a point of reflection on how contemporary cities have evolved through contemporary art.

Screening animations at the Dallas Art Fair organized by Gretchen L. Wagner, Artistic Director and Chief Curator, Oklahoma Contemporary and Marfa Contemporary. 

Participating artists include Brian Alfred, JJ Peet, Raphael Montanez Ortiz, Tomislav Gotovac, Desiree Holman, Sundblad/ Granat Films and Pul Kos, among others. 

For Atelier Ace Issue, our series of limited edition art prints, we asked Brian Alfred, a multimedia artist originally from Steel City, USA, to envision an exclusive print for us and for you. With hard-edges, flat geometric forms and imagery borrowed from Circuit of the Americas in Travis County, Texas, Alfred uses speed, car racing and rituals of spectacle as avenues to explore contemporary ways of seeing.

Postcards from the End of the World: Brian Alfred’s Colorful, Cautionary Tales

Painter and digital artist Brian Alfred presents the world as a series of flattened fragments. Working from photographs, the Brooklyn-based artist digitally creates compressed, simplified images that capture the energy and anxieties of the modern world. Highway overpasses, empty offices, cityscapes, and even public figures’ faces are reduced into planes of flat color, which the artist carefully paints in taped-off portions, creating crisp images that sit somewhere between the handmade art of paintings, cartoon-like animation, and mass-produced perfection. His latest series, on view in a new show at Ameringer | McEnery | Yohe, takes automobile racing as its point of departure.

BRIAN ALFRED AT AMERINGER | MCENERY | YOHE

The New York based gallery Ameringer | McEnery | Yohe has announced a forthcoming solo exhibition by the Brooklyn based artist Brian Alfred which will present recent works under the title It Takes A Million Years To Become Diamonds So Let’s All Just Burn Like Coal Until The Sky Is Black. The solo exhibition will feature new images by Brian Alfred based around the exploration of automobile racing, his cropped abstract works capturing everything from the excitement of the cars and racing through to the global investment elements of companies that contribute the money to the races by including representations of oil slogans in his images. The exhibition at Ameringer | McEnery | Yohe, who last year presented a show of work by Wolf Kahn (see more in this video), sees Brian Alfred capturing small slices of time that aim to capture the emotions of watching the races.

A slight variation on a theme this one, although as the title to this AV collaboration between Brooklyn-based abstract pop artist Brian Alfred and longstanding Battles serviceman Ian Williams suggests, there’s Beauty In Danger. There’s danger in beauty too, but as precisionist blocks of automobile-themed pastel dart across the screen this one’s indubitably a question of the outwardly beautiful residing deep within the dangers of modern-day locomotion. The volatile flickering of restive traffic lights; the neon smear of speeding cars; the immoderate regard paid to the music booming from the tinny in-car stereo. In this instance, we’d implore you pay the most intimate of attentions to the music in question, for Williams has composed an electronically affected piece that’s as stark as Alfred’s itself engaging visual element: efficient and in certain respects rather Germanic, it correlates perfectly with his collaborator’s Autobahn-obligated auxiliary stimulant to make for a sensorial masterwork that’s racy as it is incontrovertibly well executed.

Mercury Retrograde: Animated Realities

Brian Alfred, Aline Bouvy, Cliff Evans, eteam (Franziska Lamprecht, Hajoe Moderegger), Scott Gelber, John Gillis, Jan Nalevka, Karina Aguilera Skvirsky

Curated by Željka Himbele and William Heath

Three or four times a year, the planet Mercury appears to move backward in its orbit when seen from Earth. This optical illusion is referred to as Mercury retrograde. In popular astrology, Mercury retrograde marks intense periods when things go awry, signaling the need for reflection and revision of our lives. This is a time for veering away from the past and taking cautious steps forward. Mercury’s cycle has been speculated as the cause of major course corrections for society; it gives us a chance to grow as humans, to raise critical awareness, and possibly make a movement towards radical change.

There’s a lot of product going on here,” I heard a woman say into her cell phone at the mega-art fair Art Basel Miami Beach 2014.

Still, even in the context of the vast amount of money changing hands at the Miami Beach Convention Center, where the main fair is taking place, there are pockets of resistantly antimaterialist art, and outside its walls some performance and film are to be found.

Some of the films were made available to me for advance viewing, and among them were many worth watching. Tabor Robak’s 20XX (2013) (Team Gallery) features a lush, unthreatening cityscape overrun by neon and Klieg lights and advertisements for media and game brands on the fantasy buildings. The resurgent Babette Mangolte’s Water Motor (1978) (Broadway 1602/Sikkema Jenkins) elegantly documents Trisha Brown’s loose-limbed dancing, with a seductive repetition of the sequence in slow motion. Leo Gabin’s Oh Baby (2013) (Elizabeth Dee/Peres Projects) is a low-tech, low-production value music video with some fun editing choices. Brian Alfred’s Under Thunder and Fluorescent Lights (2104) (Ameringer McEnery Yohe) is an animation involving allusions to landscape and architecture and a mutating, colored sun.

Brian Alfred, assistant professor of art, will exhibit his new animation "Under Thunder And Florescent Lights" on the 7,000-square-foot outdoor projection wall of the Frank Gehry-designed New World Center as part of Art Basel, in Miami Beach, Florida, Dec. 4 to 7. Art Basel stages the world's premier modern and contemporary art shows annually in Basel, Switzerland; Miami Beach; and Hong Kong. This is the second consecutive year Alfred has been selected for the Art Basel Miami Film program.

Selected by David Gryn, Director of Artprojx, the Film sector includes over 80 works by some of today's most exciting artists from Latin America, the United States, Europe, Asia and beyond.

Film presents works in both the outdoor setting of New World Center's SoundScape Park and on six touch-screen monitors within the newly designed Film Library at Art Basel's show.

On January 15, 2014, the Montclair Art Museum will celebrate its centennial. On view will be a collection-based exhibition throughout the Museum and its grounds, with 100 works reflecting its rich cultural history and legacy. 

New York, New York - Ameringer | McEnery | Yohe is pleased to announce that Brian Alfred is now represented by the gallery.