Brian Wood in his East Chatham, NY studio. © Rick Wenner
Brian Wood is an American artist working in New York. His paintings, drawings, photographs, prints, films, and books are exhibited internationally. Wood is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Brooklyn Museum, National Gallery of Art in DC, Ludwig Museum in Cologne, Museum of Modern Art in Prague, National Gallery of Canada, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Houston Museum of Fine Arts, McNay Art Museum in San Antonio, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Asheville Art Museum, Montreal Museum of Contemporary Art, Blanton Museum of Art, and many others.
Wood has had 50 solo exhibitions in international galleries and museums and has exhibited in more than 200 group shows including at the Museum of Modern Art, Brooklyn Museum, Walker Art Center, Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, LA County Museum of Art, Museum of American Art in DC, Houston Museum of Fine Arts, Seibu Museum in Tokyo, Documenta in Kassel, Germany, American Academy of Arts & Letters, NYC, and many others.
Brian Wood's awards include the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, the National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, the New York Foundation for the Arts Grant, numerous Canada Council Grants including the Established Artist “A” Grant, and the 2020 American Academy of Arts & Letters Purchase Award. Wood was a 2019 Rome Prize finalist.
Artist Statement
Orpheus, at his death: his mystic’s body torn apart and cast to the waiting landscape. His head, held tenderly by the river Hebrus, sings as it floods to wider seas. Inside that sacred vessel, streaming on to Lesbos, live songs of underworld and ecstasy.
The boundaries and limits of consciousness hold a particular fascination for me and it seems likely the obsessions in my work derive from the earliest phase of life before language and before self. Pleasure, suffering, sensing, aggression, devouring and expelling merge in a timeless non-reflective realm…
“Wood creates a kind of Symbolist world in which emerging into life and being devoured by it are part of the same inexorable process. As in the early work by Georgia O’Keeffe and Arthur Dove, the erotic and the spiritual are of a piece.”
— Holland Cotter, The New York Times
“Similar to the surrounding landscape, Wood makes works that resist easy spatial closure, overlaying them with multitudinous references that re-create the imbricated flux of thought. This kind of indeterminacy of place, which is not to be confused with dislocation, provides the perfect setting for the surreal spatial poetics and layered transmutations that compose Wood’s drawings and paintings.”
— Jeffrey Grunthaner, BOMB Magazine
"...The history of Brian Wood’s approach to painting, it’s consistency of method and quality, ensures that when the moments unfold, when individuals are open to be vulnerable before an artwork’s inarticulable and unpredictable experience – to suspend their distrust – the paintings seen here, and yet to be made, will resonate more strongly than they ever have before.”
— Rob Colvin, Caesura Magazine
“Wallace Stevens’ poems live in the gap between the intelligible and the intuitive, or, as he put it in another poem, between ‘the nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.’ Brian Wood inhabits this same territory.”
— Eleanor Heartney, “Brian Wood’s Art Beyond Thought”
Heka, 2023, Oil on canvas, 24 x 20 in.
Asymptote, 2023, Oil on canvas, 24 x 20 in.
Mana, 2021, Oil on canvas, 12 x 10 in.
Spire, 2023, Graphite on paper, 14x11 in.
Scupper, 2020, Graphite on paper, 14x11”
Cathedral, 2018, Graphite on paper, 14x11”
Brian Wood in Plant Based at WAAM in Woodstock, NY. August 16 - October 6, 2024
Brian Wood is showing Heka, 2023 @MEPAINTSME, July 18 - August 21, 2024
Upstate Gnarly, an exhibition of 4 artists at Brian Wood and Ashley Garrett’s Studio for Upstate Art Weekend, July 19 - 21, 2024
Brian Wood’s drawing Canto II in La Banda 2024 at Tappeto Volante Gallery, NYC. January 30 - March 3, 2024
McNay Art Museum, San Antonio, TX, installs Brian Wood painting Vehicle in Permanent Collection Gallery, 2023
Brian Wood’s paintings and drawings in Extramundane at Turley Gallery, Hudson, NY. April 8 - 30, 2023.
Brian Wood in Caesura Magazine - essay by critic Rob Colvin
Brian Wood in the 2020 Invitational Exhibition of Visual Arts at the American Academy of Arts & Letters, New York City
Brian Wood
Contra-Dia, 2018
Edition of 12, 42 pages
Brian Wood
Contra-Dia, 2018
Pages 16 & 17
Brian Wood
Contra-Dia, 2018
Pages 22, 23 & 26
Bang, 2000, Ink on mylar, 21 x 15 in.
Flight, 2000, Ink on mylar, 15 x 21 in.
Night Light, 2007, Ink on mylar, 67 x 46 in.
Swarm, 1991, Ink/photo on mylar, 18 x 12”
Chalice, 1991, Ink/photo on mylar, 18 x 12”
Worlds, 1994, Ink/photo on mylar, 16 x 10”
The Museum of Modern Art: The History and the Collection
Essay by Sam Hunter
A comprehensive overview of the entire collection of The Museum of Modern Art with one of Brian Wood’s photographic constructions from MoMA’s permanent collection.
Brian Wood: Drawings
Visionary text by Brian Wood
A career survey of drawings published for Brian Wood’s solo 2019 drawing exhibition at Arts + Leisure Gallery, NYC
Brian Wood: Paintings
Essay by Eleanor Heartney
Catalogue with a selection of paintings for Brian Wood’s solo painting exhibition at Cross Contemporary Art, Saugerties, NY
The Night, 2000, Mixed media on paper, 17x11”
Crib, 2001, Mixed media on paper, 17x11”
Cauldron, 2002, Mixed media on paper, 17x11”
Rolling-Out #1, 1996, 8 lithographs in folio
Rolling-Out #2, lithograph, 29.75 x 14.75 in.
Rolling-Out #4, lithograph, 29.75 x 14.75 in.
Towers, 1989, Oil on canvas, 50 x 38 in.
Athanor, 1991, Oil on canvas, 96 x 72 in.
Salt Bed, 1987, Oil on canvas, 96 x 80 in.
Copyright © Brian Wood 2024