Zürcher Studio is very happy to announce Brian Belott’s second solo show at Zürcher Studio, New York. Andrew Russeth met and interviewed the artist in his studio in Brooklyn. Please find enclosed an excerpt of the interview to be published by Zürcher Studio :

“Brian Belott makes deliriously seductive paintings. Using the reverse-glass technique, he builds glitzy, and sometimes gritty, grids that sparkle and twinkle and trick the eye because of their reflectiveness, changing color depending on where and when you look at them. […] He had a number of new ones on hand, and with his typical mischievousness, he had recently begun embedding patterned girls’ socks and Silly-Bandz within those sumptuous grids.

But those paintings are just one part of his multifarious art practice, which hops nimbly across mediums. He’s amassed thousands of found photographs and arranged them into moving and hilarious books, choreographed manic and inventive dances and performances, made supremely messy, sensual wet-on-wet paintings (some stacked with food), recorded sound pieces from answering-machine tapes and records, invented languages, and produced at least one certified madcap video masterpiece. […] Belott called YouTube a “collager’s paradise,” a phrase that also perfectly fits his art, which is animated by both Matisse and the Marx Brothers, and involves collecting, cutting, slicing, and dicing existing material into a range of new forms, proffering a relentless, freewheeling, and often mysterious joie de vivre.”

After the grid paintings, the new glass paintings with the socks are a real shift. Belott explains : “I bought, on Flatbush, girls’socks so that they would have more fun patterns on them, more colors, more things to riff off of. I’m always working out polar opposites, and am really interested in mash-ups and schizophrenia. […] The original idea was to combine Agnes Martin and Liberace and to try to make beautiful minimal paintings but make them with this glitzy material through the reverse-glass medium. The shininess made me develop a palette that was pearlescent, shiny and reflective. […] I wanted to counter that preciousness that was coming about, and that’s why the socks came up. […]

The other big aspect for me is making up fake languages and fake songs. […] A friend of mine, Billy, slept on the floor right here, and he wouldn’t get up, so I would come in and sing songs to him to wake him the fuck up. I would record them on a hand tape deck. And they were all fake Folkways. […] A Goosh Noosh” came from the “Waking Up Billy” album. […] One of the most influential things I ever heard was James Joyce reading a couple pages from Finnegan’s Wake, and I became obsessed with it, and I memorized a lot of it, just based on sound. […] A Goosh Noosh” came from that thing that I had mentioned about waking my friend up and making up fake languages. I think “Agoosh Noosh” has the sound of something religious.

A Goosh Noosh, catalogue, interview by Andrew Russeth-August 15, 2012, Zürcher Studio NY, 2012

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Brian Belott lives and works in New York, NY. He attended Cooper Union for his MFA but was thrown out in 1994. He then attended SVA and received his BFA in 1995. Belott’s selected solo shows include: in 2011, “Congo Guac” at Galerie Zürcher, Paris; in 2010, “The Joy of File” at Zürcher Studio, NY; in 2007, “Swirly Music” at CANADA, NY. His selected group exhibitions include: in 2012, “This is How my Brain Works” at Radiator Gallery, NY; in 2011, “Go Figure” curated by Eddie Martinez at DODGEgallery, NY; “Paper A-Z” at Sue Scott Gallery, NY ; “DADARHEA” at Canada Gallery, NY ; in 2010, “Salad Days” at The Journal, BK; in 2009, “The Living and the Dead” at Gavin Brown, NY; in 2008, “Book/Shelf” at MoMA, NY, among others. His work is a part of the Museum of Modern Art’s permanent collection, and he has been reviewed in the NY Times and The New Yorker, Art in America among others.