Robert Brady at Churchill Arts Council

The Churchill Arts Council opened a new visual art exhibition of recent mixed-media works by Robert Brady at the Oats Park Art Center on Saturday, February 27, 2010.

“Mined to Bare features works in a wide variety of media from wood sculpture to ceramics. The artist will conduct a talk on the work and its inspirations at 4:00 p.m. and a reception will follow from 5-7 p.m. Both the conversation with the artist and the reception are free and open-to-the-public. For information, call 423-1440.Internationally renowned sculptor Robert Brady was born in 1946 in Reno. He was an indifferent student in high school in Reno, and needing an easy class to make up credits missed during a lengthy illness, he signed up for art. By the end of his first day he was enthralled with clay. His teacher gave him the courage to leave Reno to study in Oakland at what is today the California College of Art.

Thus began Brady’s artistic career as a potter. This led him into figurative ceramic sculpture and eventually to figurative wood sculpture. Brady describes the initial shift in media as a risk, but something which made sense due to the warm and receptive nature of both materials

Brady pursued his Master of Fine Arts degree at the University of California, Davis, where his mentor was the internationally acclaimed ceramicist Robert Arneson. Brady was also profoundly influenced by the sculptures of Isamu Noguchi and Peter Voulkos.

Nevada is at the center of his work. He’s said that in the desert, “It seems like the artifice and the frills and the dressing has eroded and cannot exist there. So there is more of the baring of the fundamental, geological soul of this universe there.” These are exactly the essential, fundamental qualities Brady has always sought in his art, be it from a vessel or a human figure, which is, in the end, a kind of vessel.

He is very prolific and seems to move effortlessly between pottery, ceramic sculpture and wood sculpture, with his unique style and imagery morphing, yet remaining uniquely distinguishable. Brady is currently a Professor of Art at Sacramento State University and resides in Berkeley, Calif.

This exhibition, and CAC’s visual art programs have been made possible thanks to major support from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the visual arts.”

– Kirk Robertson, Lahontan Valley News

“A more pleasant reminder, and my immediate reason for visiting [Fallon] , was Robert Brady’s show of sculptures and drawings, Mined to Bare: Recent and Mixed Media Works. It occupies two pristine, exquisitely-lighted galleries and includes 50 pieces. It’s one of the strongest, best-presented shows I’ve seen in some time. Most of the work was made in 2009 and 2010; yet it feels like an accurate measure of Brady’s output and mood during the past decade. It includes many of his brooding, inscrutable, long-limbed, life-sized, wood figures, his wall-mounted bronze and ceramic vessels and a wide range of other sculptural forms that show him pushing deeper and deeper into abstraction, while at the same time providing viewers with plenty of representational handholds: faces, tools, architectural details. Seen in this setting, not far from where Brady grew up in Reno, his references to implements, artifacts, glyphs and tribal art resonate more strongly than they do in urban environments and take on heightened significance.

For those who think of Brady solely as a sculptor, his drawings will come as a revelation. They include: cosmic-leaning, organic abstractions (made by spray-painting rice kernels and then peeling them off the paper); stitched collages that re-deploy, in a cartoon-like fashion, many of his well-known facial and figurative motifs; and interlocking geometric shapes made of quavering lines that suggest crumbling architecture. If you think of Vija Celmins and William Kentridge when viewing some of these pictures, you understand the mental and material distance Brady has traveled, from his beginnings as a front-rank ceramic sculptor to his present position as an everything-goes mixed-media conjurer. (To read Roth’s review of Brady’s show at b. sakata garo, see http://www.squarecylinder.com/2009/11/robert-brady-b-sakata-garo/)

– David M. Roth, SquareCylinder.com; Photos: David M. Roth