‘Brian Calvin’ is the first comprehensively illustrated monograph of the Californian artist’s work, which, despite being cartoony in style, is very painterly with highly-symmetrical classical composition. Calvin uses acrylic paint, simple lines, a matte and flattened palette and skewed cropping, attributing his androgynous, bohemian figures with an enchanted essence and spirit of melancholia. Brian Calvin’s disarmingly low-key paintings explore a world populated with androgynous bohemians, skinnies in groups and trippy teenage characters coolly detached and aimlessly gazing out from a sundrenched, Southern Californian backdrop. Something of a celebration of slackerdom, they also reveal the artist’s keen powers of observation, rigorous approach to his craft and attention to the formal dimensions of his medium.
Calvin’s highly stylised figures, flattened pallet and skewed cropping, have earned him comparison with Alex Katz and David Hockney, who he appears to be at once emulating and parodying, while simultaneously referencing music and pop-culture icons. Despite the presence of his cartoon-ish protagonists, the paintings utterly resonate with the principles of abstraction; figures stand as vessels for unplaceable narratives, ones which only unveil themselves through fragments and uncanny reflections.
The first comprehensively illustrated monograph of the Californian painter’s practice, ‘Brian Calvin’ is a beautifully illustrated publication spanning over a decade of work and comprising interviews and specially commissioned text, placing the artist’s work in a broad art and popular culture context.
Calvin’s work has been shown in numerous solo exhibitions in U.S. and European galleries, and has been included in group shows. 83 colour and b/w