Artist: Roger Brown

GRAY presents Roger Brown: Weathervane, the gallery’s first monographic exhibition dedicated to Brown since announcing exclusive representation of the artist’s estate. Weathervane explores the artist’s vision of an emotionally charged contemporary life set at the tense border between the built environment and the natural world.

Featuring eleven paintings from the 1980s and 1990s, the exhibition reflects Brown’s clarity of vision as an artist both unafraid to face sociopolitical headwinds and unable to ignore ecological destruction. Playing with shifts of scale, Brown communicates reverence and awe for the power of nature while his perspective on human plight sees a fraught and tenuous future. For example, in the 1980 painting Lake Effect, Brown paints the grand high-rises of Chicago, one of the world’s most famous skylines at the time, as a minuscule strip of skyline against alarming concentric arcs of red storm clouds.

In rhythmic aerial compositions such as Weather Map and Crosswinds, humans with their monotonous houses and stretches of highways are diminutive characters beholden to far more vast meteorological systems. Beyond his visions of cityscapes and sprawling suburbia, his focus on clouds in natural wanderings like those in Couple Progressing Towards Mount Rincon continues as a means to contrast scale. In other canvases such as The Flight of Daedalus and Icarus, his study for a commissioned mural on the façade of 120 North La Salle Street in Chicago, Brown looks to mythic figures for a more individual parable of sky-high human aspirations meeting fateful realities.

As with much of Brown’s oeuvre, the mesmerizing scenes and archetypal characters scattered among them return to a sense of autobiography, nowhere more elegiacally so than in his 1997 Burned Hills, completed in the months leading up to his death after a decade of battling AIDS. Created across a career spent making meteorological observations into allegorical manifestos on shifting winds, Brown’s paintings in Weathervane convey a world teetering on the precipice of pleasure and peril.