VISUAL ART & MUSEUMS

February 5-March 12, 2011

A native of Nashville and graduate of Vanderbilt University’s Peabody College, Brett De Palma has been challenging and reinventing the idea of artistic freedom for over thirty years. De Palma moved to New York City's Greenwich Village in the early 1980’s, washing dishes for almost a year until Red Grooms offered him a job painting his sculpture and he obtained the position of gallery assistant at Sperone Westwater Fischer. He became a punk new-waver, going to CBGB after hours, and all the while painting abstract anatomy on rolls of bookbinding material from the basement of his building. De Palma’s big break came after meeting new-wave impresario and artist-turned-curator, Diego Cortez. Cortez subsequently included De Palma in the New York New-Wave show of 1981 along with acclaimed artists Keith Haring and Jean Michel Basquiat.

Although De Palma has continued to create art since his heyday in the 1980’s, De Palma humorously states, “I have only recently emerged from the Cave of Fire, Water, Ice, Smoke, and Mirrors through the Academy of Education to the Institutionalized Greed of Leveraged Mergers and the Golden Age of Class Consolidation and Private Property into the Light of Hometown Celebrity Sunshine!”

This sort of sharp yet playful humor is characteristic of De Palma’s personality and his approach to creating art. De Palma describes his work as a reflection of the world, filtered through himself, and as such, has no rules as it pertains to ways of proceeding. As an artist, his goal is to open possibilities rather than to restrict freedoms, not to “do this instead of that.” With each composition, he aims to discover and express the depth of character and thought that makes for a richer domain from which springs a more authentic view of life. The synthesis of contradictory elements is what makes his art so unique and compelling. By allowing conflicting hard edges and soft forms, sensuality and roughness, humor and darkness, De Palma represents real life in all its quirkiness.

Brett De Palma’s extensive exhibition experience includes one-person exhibitions at the Tony Shafrazi Gallery, NY; Emilio Mazzoli, Italy; and the Arnold Hertsand Gallery, NYC. His art has been reviewed in the New York Times, the New Yorker, the Village Voice, Dialogue Magazine, Roll Magazine, the Tennessean, the Nashville Business Journal, and the Rockland Review. His works reside in many prominent public collections including the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Smithsonian Institute in Washington D.C., the U.S. State Department, Disney World, the Eli Broad Family Foundation, and the Tennessee State Museum. De Palma has been an adjunct professor at the School of Visual Arts in New York since 1988.

Image:  Creationism, 2010. Acrylic and collage on canvas, 50 x 45 1/2 inches.

The closing reception is a part of the First Saturday Art Crawl.