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…

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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.

Someday, art lovers will have the technology to attend 50 receptions across as many square miles in the space of two hours — but not this Saturday, when what seems like half the galleris in L.A. simultaneously present blockbuster season-openers.  Culver City makes this Hobson’s choice [of which exhibition to attend] a bit easier, offering a density of must-see exhibitions within a walkable geography….Kimberly Brooks returns to Taylor De Cordoba with haunting, fashion-forward portraiture.” – Shana Nys Dambrot

Kimberly Brooks featured in C Magazine.

Kimberly Brooks: Thread, at Taylor De Cordoba, included in “Must See Paintings Show: September” in New American Paintings.

The Museum of Contemporary Art invites you to

The Fashionable Body: An Art and Fashion Dialogue
Tuesday, May 3, 2011
Refreshments: 6:30pm Panel: 7–9pm
Ray Kurtzman Theater at Creative Artists Agency (CAA)
2000 Avenue of the Stars, Los Angeles, 90067

Join the MOCA Contemporaries for a discussion about art and fashion with celebrity stylist and Academy Award-nominated costume designer Arianne Phillips, fashion designer Michael Schmidt, and painter Kimberly Brooks, moderated by fashion and culture writer, curator, consultant, and the former West Coast bureau chief of Women’s Wear Daily, Rose Apodaca. The panelists will discuss the convergence of couture and pop culture as it relates to performance and visual art.