James Brown

James Brown: Gothic and Renaissance influences

James Brown was born in Los Angeles in 1951. He initially acquired his Bachelor of Fine Arts at the Immaculate Heart College in Hollywood followed by a few years in Paris at École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts but struggled with its classical orientation. Despite this, he initially stayed in Paris, but travelled through Europe several times and was deeply impressed by Italian Renaissance and medieval painting. James Brown held his first exhibition in 1983 after his return to the USA at the New York gallery of Tony Shafrazi (born 1943), alongside artists such as Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960-1988), Donald Baechler (1956-2022) and Keith Haring (1958-1990). During this period, his work mixed modernist principles with influences from traditional indigenous art.

A welcome guest in the great art galleries

James Brown became very successful in New York's galleries and museums in the 1980s as he seemed to be related to the Bad Painting and Neo-Expressionism of the East Village painters who were in vogue at the time. His works were shown at the Leo Castelli Gallery, the Gagosian Gallery and the Pace Gallery, and in Naples, Lucio Amelio (1931-1994) presented Brown's works to a European audience. After the disappearance of the East Village art scene, the artist shifted his exhibition focus to Europe. For several years, Brown travelled back and forth between New York and Paris before moving to Mexico with his wife Alexandra (née Condon) in 1995 where they lived for nine years on a hacienda in the valley of Oaxaca with their two sons and a daughter. During this time, Brown often exhibited his paintings in Mexico, Europe and the USA, but also devoted himself together with his wife to various artistic projects other than painting.

New artistic projects in Mexica

James Brown and his wife Alexandra collaborated with Mexican artists to create rugs woven in the traditional Mexican style and subsequently developed a series of art books based on this process, featuring these and similar motifs. In addition to his worldwide-exhibited paintings, Brown also created sculptures and collages, walking a blurred line between figuration and abstraction. Faces and objects are nevertheless clearly recognisable in many of his unrealistic depictions, while some abstract scenes are reminiscent of star constellations and rock formations. The New York Times art critic Martha Schwendener praised Brown's collages as updates of the cubist art of Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) and Georges Braque (1882-1963).

James Brown and his wife Alexandra died in a car accident in Mexico on 22 February 2020.