GOINGS ON: ART: ROGER BROWN — MACCARONE

The New Yorker, June 26, 2015

Late, great works by the still underappreciated Chicago painter, who died in 1997. Abstracted landscape paintings (rolling hills and mountains in the form of stripes and semicircles) have frames on their lower edges that extend into shelves. Brown, like many of the Imagists in the Second City, had a commitment to folk traditions and self-taught artists, and the little ledges in front of his paintings support glazed coffee mugs, earthenware sake cups, platters shaped like shells, and a strange little fabric model of a sofa. Brown’s reduction of his own paintings to backdrops for these objects expresses his respect for forgotten artisans. The objects themselves recall ex-votos left for the saints in a million painted icons, turning each of Brown’s canvases into a memento mori. Through Aug. 7.

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