Kimberly Brooks is a panelist participating in a public forum at Pennsylvania Academy Of Fine Arts entitled “The Female Gaze: Women Artist Making Their Way In The World.”

Kimberly Brooks is the subject of Bruce Helander’s article “Artists To Watch” in the latest issue of The Art Economist.

To view the article as a pdf file, click here.

Kimberly Brooks debuts three new paintings in Coming Together, a pop-up group painting exhibition curated by Sonny Ruscha Bjornson and Laura Grover. Opens February 3 at Fabien Fryns Fine Art. On view through February 18, 2012.

“Thread,” Kimberly Brooks at Taylor de Cordoba, by James Scarborough

Kimberly Brooks’s “Thread” at Taylor De Cordoba is neither about fashion nor the women who bring it to life but about how fashion lives but for the moment it’s worn. It’s about the expectations that clothes elicit, and once those expectations are met, memories of the occasion create attempts to rekindle the irretrievable beauty of, say, a “Sunset Boulevard” Gloria Swanson. As such, the show offers a metaphor of aging: we do, style does, and, as is the case here, specific time spent in the particular clothes does…

Click here to read the rest of the article on Perhaps Perhaps Perhaps.

Kimberly Brooks At Taylor De Cordoba

In her latest body of work, Kimberly Brooks continues to explore portraiture, specifically the complexities of representations of female identities. While in her previous series, including Mom’s Friends (2007) and The Stylist Project (2010), the artist used figures to construct narratives, here the female form is part of a broader abstracted landscape. And while earlier portraits boasted an uncanny likeness to their subjects, Brooks’ style has shifted into something that is simultaneously looser and richer. Facial features have been abstracted and bodies distorted. Fashion and costume, a longtime theme for Brooks, is also deconstructed. Once painstakingly rendered folds and drapes have been reduced to their essential shapes and color fields. In these sumptuous new images, Brooks continues to address questions about how we frame beauty, and the phenomenon of fashion as a both pop culture and artistic touchstone.   Taken as a whole, the new paintings create a meta-narrative that contemplates “threads” that define, unite and separate us across different cultures and eras.

Make sure to catch Kimberly Brooks’ third solo show currently on view at Taylor De Cordoba through October 22nd.

Fine Art: Kimberly Brooks Shows Her Oil Paintings at Taylor De Cordoba Gallery in L.A.

By Amy Fine Collins

I don’t know if Kimberly Brooks ambushes her subjects all in the same way, but I can vouch for the fact that when she swooped into my life, in order create a portrait for her Stylist Project series, we formed an instantaneous friendship that seemed to have originated in medias res. I welcomed her into my home and into my life in a way that would make many longtime acquaintances feel like strangers. The speed with which Kimberly works is in keeping with the accelerated pace of our friendship. Kimberly snapped pictures of me rat-a-tat-tat with a stop-action sports setting, a way for her to layer up cubistic multiple perspectives of my pose…

Full Article Here

Kimberly Brooks featured in Architects and Artisans.

THREAD BY KIMBERLY BROOKS

by Robin Newman

Kimberly Brooks’s solo exhibit Thread opens September 10 at Taylor De Cordoba in Los Angeles. Thread marks a departure for Brooks from the realistic style and direct portraiture of her previous work. The new paintings present distorted figures against broad, abstract landscapes. In the past Brooks has used stylists as models as a way to address issues of fashion and femininity. Here again fashion and costume play an important part in the work. As the body has been disfigured in the paintings, clothes too are deconstructed and loosely rendered. Through abstracting and distilling the representation of the dressed female body, Brooks engages the way in which beauty and fashion are seen.