Group Thinking, 2021

Brian Calvin   Emerging artists

Brian Calvin is an influential contemporary American painter. Known for his large-scale, stylized portraits of women, his paintings are characterized by their sun-drenched palettes and flattened planes of color that recall Alex Katz or David Hockney. Though the artist explains that the figures in his work are not based on real people, he has described them as being specifically about Californian youth. “Although the figures I paint are entirely invented," he has said, “I pay close attention to how people construct their own identity and that certainly comes to bear on the paintings as they progress." Born in Visalia, CA in 1969, he went on to study at the University of California in Berkeley before earning his MFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1994. He has been the subject of solo exhibitions at Anton Kern Gallery in New York, Almine Rech Gallery in Paris, and Corvi-Mora in London, among others. His work can be found in numerous public collections, including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Portland Art Museum, and the Aïshti Foundation.