Brian Scott Campbell
These diminutively-scaled paintings suggest scenes and landscapes with rudimentary lines and simple geometries. The compositions combine everyday iconography with the archetypal and hallucinatory. As such, the imagery reflects the idea of memory itself, as a collection of real and fictional experiences. Drawing—an important gravitational point and central language for these paintings—accounts for the preference for flatness, grayscale colors, and trading heavily in lively immediacy. These paintings merge classical motifs with a comic vernacular. Humor is allowed to surface while also being deftly held in check, taking a jab at the sublime, and permitting something sober and emblematic to emerge.
Brian Scott Campbell (b. 1983, Columbus, OH) received a BFA from Columbus College of Art and Design, OH and an MFA from Mason Gross School of the Arts, Rutgers University, NJ. His solo exhibitions include: Marfa Invitational Projects, Texas; Galerie SPZ, Prague, Czech Republic; Arts & Leisure, New York; Stene Projects, Stockholm; Harbinger Project Space, Reykjavík, Iceland; Left Field Gallery, Los Osos, California; Dutton, New York. Campbell’s awards and residencies include the Atlantic Center for the Arts Residency with artist Dana Schutz; The Macedonian Institute; a McColl Center for Visual Art Full Fellowship; a Vermont Studio Center Fellowship; the Artist in the Marketplace Program, Bronx Museum, New York. His work has been reviewed in Modern Painters/Blouin ArtInfo; Whitehot Magazine; Los Angeles Times; Contemporary Art Review LA, The Huffington Post; Hyperallergic; Two Coats of Paint; It’s Nice That (London); and i-D Magazine/Vice, amongst others. He participated in group exhibitions at Fredericks & Freiser, New York; Jeff Bailey Gallery, New York; Anna Zorina, New York; Zevitas Marcus, Los Angeles; David Shelton Gallery, Houston; Ruttkowski; 68, Munich; NADA New York, Untitled Miami Beach Art Fair, and Johansson Projects. Campbell currently lives and works in Denton, Texas, and is an Assistant Professor in Drawing and Painting at The University of North Texas.
The aerial and geometrical logic of the landscape by Brian Scott Campbell | June 16, 2022 by Maria Vittoria Pinotti
“In this way, the artist portrays from the landscape what manifests itself only phenomenally with a deliberately pure style, and here the light-soaked strokes seem precisely those of a “child” following an aerial and geometric logic, adept at bringing back the fluidity of natural environments.” Link
Brian Scott Campbell | March 10, 2021 by Benjamin Terrell
“[Campbell] paints similar states of in between, like embers or boats that float in anticipation of being boarded. His landscapes are cocoons, vessels or Otis elevators where the viewer is taken elsewhere to emerge.” Link
Come Together: “Whole Cloth” at SITE131 | March 9, 2020 by Michael Frank Blair
“The evidence of Campbell’s mastery is in how little he feels compelled to “prove” it in the obvious ways. He focuses on the thinnest sliver of ground between materiality and pictoriality.” Link
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