“I prefer to experience abstraction through the creation and tending of images. Painting provides the medium.” — Brian Calvin
American painter Brian Calvin began developing a figurative, non-narrative, pictorial style in the 1990s, with close-up treatment of subjects, highly composed structures, and flat, luminous colours endowing his large-scale paintings with an ineffable quality. Condensing historically-recognised genres such as portraiture and landscape whilst anchoring his compositions in certain features that draw the viewer in, Calvin’s elongated, hieratic characters reinvent these genres via Cubism and Picasso. With pictorial economy, Calvin’s paintings reinvent any recognisable figurative elements as a starting point for exploring a more abstract and formal way to reflect on what constitutes painting.