Taylor de Cordoba in Los Angeles presents new oil paintings by Kimberly Brooks. The exhibition is titled Thread and runs until October 22, 2011. In this interview with the Los Angeles-based artist, Kimberly Brooks talks about the concept of the show; the new approach she has chosen to create the works; her inspiration and her development as an artist. The video above is an excerpt; the full-length interview is available below.
Kimberly Brooks was born in New York. She lives and works in Los Angeles, California. She studied at the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris, France, Otis College of Art and Design, and the UCLA in Los Angeles.
In her latest body of work, Kimberly Brooks continues to explore portraiture, specifically the complexities of representations of female identities. While in her previous series, including Mom’s Friends (2007) and The Stylist Project (2010), the artist used figures to construct narratives, here the female form is part of a broader abstracted landscape. And while earlier portraits boasted an uncanny likeness to their subjects, Brooks’ style has shifted into something that is simultaneously looser and richer. Facial features have been abstracted and bodies distorted. Fashion and costume, a longtime theme for Brooks, is also deconstructed. Once painstakingly rendered folds and drapes have been reduced to their essential shapes and color fields. In these sumptuous new images, Brooks continues to address questions about how we frame beauty, and the phenomenon of fashion as a both pop culture and artistic touchstone. Taken as a whole, the new paintings create a meta-narrative that contemplates “threads” that define, unite and separate us across different cultures and eras.
Kimberly Brooks’ work has been featured in numerous juried exhibitions organized by curators from the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Museum of Modern Art. Her work has been featured in myriad publications including the Los Angeles Times, Art Ltd., Daily Serving, The Huffington Post, Vanity Fair, Vogue, among others.
Kimberly Brooks: Thread at Taylor de Cordoba Gallery, Los Angeles. Interview with Kimberly Brooks, October 4, 2011.
— Right-click (Mac: ctrl-click) this link to download Quicktime video file.
Complete interview (11:50):