Name Brett Reichman | Role Artist | |
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Brett Reichman is a painter and Associate Professor at the San Francisco Art Institute where he teaches in both the graduate and undergraduate programs. Born in Pittsburgh PA, he has lived and worked in San Francisco since 1984. His work came to fruition in the late 1980s out of cultural activism that addressed the AIDS epidemic and gay identity politics and was curated into early exhibitions that acknowledged those formative issues. These exhibitions included Situation: Perspectives on Work by Lesbian and Gay Artists at New Langton Arts in San Francisco, The Anti-Masculine at the Kim Light Gallery in Los Angeles, Beyond Loss at the Washington Project for the Arts in Washington, D.C, and In A Different Light: Visual Culture, Sexual Identity, Queer Practice at the Berkeley Art Museum, Berkeley, CA.
Reichman’s inquiry into the politics of gay culture critiques political correctness and cultural assimilation, however the approach to realism is never simply reproductive. He separates the concept of Realism (arts) from Naturalism (arts) within a discourse that views popular culture as anxious, obsessed with artificiality and unnatural beauty. His pictures take lubricious fantasy to the point of ridicule, without losing completely a quotient of psychological truth.
Oil paintings address the history of fabric and folds in painting while situating this rich history within a contemporary discourse of exaggeration, camp, and queer politic. Reichman has evidently noticed how frequently in pre-modern European painting the coursing of posh clothing and other drapery can communicate the unutterable and unpicturable -the very scandal of embodiment itself- to the suggestible mind.
Works on paper are accomplished in watercolor and gouache through the process of layered crosshatching. The crosshatch ironically builds up the image while simultaneously negating it. This opposition refers to the contradictions within the imagery itself: representative of satisfaction and dissatisfaction, fulfillment and insatiability, humor and disgust. The crosshatch creates an image stroke by stroke, further implicating the subtexts of obsessiveness, eroticism, and the hard fought, hard won achievements exemplified through personal and political struggle.
He has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions at Gallery Paule Anglim in San Francisco, the PPOW Gallery in New York, Feature Inc., NY, the Rena Bransten Gallery in San Francisco, and the Orange County Museum of Art. His work was recently included in I Am Not Monogamous, I Heart Poetry, at Feature, Inc. NY, Silence, Exile and Cunning at the Sonoma Valley Museum of Art, Kiki: The Proof Is In The Pudding at Ratio 3 Gallery in San Francisco, and Pacific Light: A Survey of California Watercolor 1908-2008, at the Nordic Watercolor Museum (Nordiska Akvarellmuseet), Skärhamn, Sweden.
Reichman’s work is in many public collections, including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Berkeley Art Museum, the Portland Art Museum, and the Orange County Museum.
His work is featured in the publications Art—A Sex Book by John Waters (filmmaker) and Bruce Hainley, Untitled Publication (Red Square), by Feature Inc, Pacific Light: A Survey of California Watercolor 1908-2008, the Nordiska Akvarellmuseet and In A Different Light: Visual Culture, Sexual Identity, Queer Practice, among others.