Kadar Brock, Mixed Media Oil Painting and Spray Paint Abstract Painting Selbstportrait, 2007

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"Selbstportrait Und Der Sonne"

This work is part of a series of alligator paintings Brock made in 2007. All are … Read more "Selbstportrait Und Der Sonne"

This work is part of a series of alligator paintings Brock made in 2007. All are painted in a somewhat similar and brash style, and are based on an incredibly vivid dream of an albino alligator with sunglasses. There were about ten in the series. Most were traded away to other artists, though one larger one was purchased from a gallery exhibition with the now defunct Buia Gallery in 2008.

Kadar Brock (born May 28, 1980) is a casualist artist. He graduated in 2002 with a BFA from Cooper Union School of Art in New York City. He lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.
Brock’s work has been reviewed in The New York Times, The Village Voice, Artforum, Bomb Magazine, The Brooklyn Rail, Interview Magazine, White Hot Magazine and Dazed and Confused, W Magazine, Bloomberg News, and Cultured Magazine.
Brock first creates relatively conventional large abstract paintings, which one commentator describes as "happy". These are then "negated and disenchanted" by a long process including adding layers, scraping, puncturing, and slicing. The results of this process are what Brock exhibits. He also incorporates fragments of such canvasses into the surfaces of other works.
W Magazine wrote that Brock was "... best known for his unorthodox approach to abstract painting, in which he creates frenetic, gestural images and then renders them unrecognizable with the help of a razor blade and a power sander."
Marina Cashdan wrote: "His studio is an ecosystem—and an efficient one—in which the artist’s methodical and ritualistic process makes for a consistent upcycling of materials across the space: when he spray-paints, he uses a canvas as the drop cloth; that canvas becomes the start of a painting; and that painting has two fates: one sliding door is going under the razor and the industrial sander, before being coated with layers of pigments and primed, sanded, and primed, a process repeated until the desired effect is reached; the other fate is to be martyred into chips or dust."
Stephan Cox, in Hunted Projects: In Dialogue wrote: "What’s fascinating is that Brock’s works are the product of an artist who aims to demystify the gesture in painting through creating rituals that in effect eradicate the didactic artist-viewer scenario. Brock doesn’t aim to create works that are easily read as being a by-product of an artist’s expression; Brock has created a set of rituals, a rolling of dice, where he, in effect has his actions directed for him. This could be through the number of brush strokes to apply or the number of cuts to make, in all, his intuitive approach to painting is not present or discernible to the viewer."
In Kadar Brock’s large-scale abstract paintings, a discordant combination of techniques, styles, and colors comes together in clashing tension. By turns described as a post-graffiti and “casualist” artist, Brock riffs on the history of abstraction, employing old tropes and marshalling simple patterns and crude geometric forms into his works, while also inviting an element of chance to determine his markings. He has explored the loose, gestural, and expressive idea of abstraction in the works of German painters like Albert Oehlen and Gerhard Richter, and He has been known to roll a Dungeons & Dragons dice to dictate marks in his paintings according to the die’s symbols and numbers. In repetitive compositions, Brock allows accidents in their production (such as heavy downward paint drips) to differentiate.
In 2013, Brock had his breakout solo show in New York, at The Hole, entitled “dredge.” The entire main gallery space was filled with new paintings. The show very quickly sold out. He has exhibited at galleries internationally, with solo shows at Vigo Gallery, London; Patron Gallery, Chicago; Gallery Diet, Miami; Thierry Goldberg, NYC; Almine Rech, Brussels and the Hole, NYC as well as group shows at Praz-Delavallade, Paris; Brand New Gallery, Milan; Saamlung, Hong Kong; Horton Gallery, Berlin; and Sperone Westwater, NYC. Brock has shown his works at the Indianapolis Museum of Contemporary Art, Indiana, Hudson Valley Center for Contemporary Art, Peekskill, New York, and Detroit MOCA, Michigan, among many other international gallery exhibitions. See less