Brian Calvin, Sadie Jane, 2023; Limited Edition Print
**Please note, per the artist’s request buyers will be required to sign a 3-year no resale agreement for hand-embellished prints. Once an order is placed, a member of our team will be in touch with this contract and prints will not be shipped until it has been returned. Failure to return a signed agreement will result in a refund sans a 5% restocking fee.**
Brian Calvin began developing a figurative, non-narrative, pictorial style during the 1990s, steeping landscapes and portraits in his Californian roots. Close-up treatment of subjects, highly composed structures, and luminous colors laid flat endow these large-scale paintings with a strange temporality. In observing his technique of pictorial economy, one gradually comes to see a type of abstraction in his representation of certain details. They reveal the true finality of his work, reaffirming the primacy of a visual reflection on painting itself and its possibilities. Calvin’s work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at venues including Almine Rech, Brussels and Anton Kern Gallery, New York. Brian Calvin’s work is also in the collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the DePaul Art Museum, and the Aïshti Foundation, among others.
Featuring Calvin’s trademark style, Sadie Jane is a surrealistic portrait of a female character who gazes back at the viewer with doubled eyes. For the artist, the image recalls Frankenstein’s Creature—a whole sewn together from disparate parts—from Mary Shelley’s famous novel. Although the figure appears to inhabit a flattened environment devoid of shadows, details such as her hair or sweater are defined by dense brushstrokes that animate them with frenzied patterns. In Calvin’s own words, “On some level, I’m always playing with elemental qualities of a painted figure, seeing what happens when you combine or distort those elements. Details are painted in and over until the resulting image declares a life of its own.”
Brian Calvin
Sadie Jane, 2023
24 x 17.5 inches
Archival pigment print
Edition of 10
Hand-embellished, signed and numbered by the artist
Edition of 50 with 4AP + 1PP
Signed and numbered by the artist
Of this series benefitting the Ali Forney Center, he notes, “I strongly support the Ali Forney Center’s mission of providing housing and healthcare to LGBTQ+ youth experiencing homelessness. It is essential to protect and to support this vulnerable community.”
ART FOR CHANGE will donate a portion of proceeds from each print sold to the Ali Forney Center in support of the organization’s programs that save the lives of LGBTQ+ young people, protecting them from the harms of homelessness and empower them with the tools needed to live independently. As in all series, artists will receive 50% of the net proceeds of print sales.
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*Unframed prints ship within 1-3 weeks.
*Framed prints ship within 3-6 weeks.