Bravin Lee programs is pleased to present “If I Should Die Before I Wake”, Danny Hobart’s first solo exhibition at the gallery.

Danny Hobart explores the fabricated nature of memory and experience in the equivalently illusive medium of painting, borrowing styles from 16th – 19th century painters. A catalogue of personal belongings, memories, and individuals, Hobart’s paintings inhabit the canvas with his contemporary quotidian, while invoking the style and technique of various Old World masters.

Hobart’s work explores the tenacity with which we cling to material objects – the safety they provide, the meaning with which we imbue them, and the danger in equating their value with our own. His paintings are both willing and reluctant self-portraits, at once serenade and swan song to his personal miasma of desire and decay. Subversively revealing, this objectified introspection seduces the audience into the same act of self-examination, despite the inherent discomfort of peeling away the gilded veneer that coats our symbolic constructs.