American artist Brian Alfred (b. 1974) is best known for his collages, paintings, and digital animations. He works fluidly between classic and contemporary media like drawing and digital art, and he depicts subject matters that range from architecture and technology to modern idealism and romantic heroism. Best known for his works that examine how people's perception of their surrounding world and culture is mediated by technology, Alfred's practice is often accounted for as socio-critical and a mirror of our contemporary times.
He creates flattened and usually depopulated worlds of color reproduced in two dimensional bold patterns, often derived from found images. Alfred explores the effect public imagery has on individual perceptions of reality by using newspaper photographs, television advertising, and the internet as source. Inscrutable scenes in his paintings and animations remind the viewer of how public media tend to show a glimpse of reality: relevant information is cropped out of the image and the overall picture is flattened into a coherent colourful narrative of a simple ideology.
In a more recent project titled Millions Now Living Will Never Die!!!, Alfred created portraits of 333 musicians, artists, actors, writers, and politician that he said all were a creative influence on his own practice. The project is a self-portrait of Alfred as much as it is an archive of his creative development.
Brian Alfred earned his B.F.A. in painting from Penn State University in 1997, and his M.F.A. from Yale University in 1999. He has had solo exhibitions at Haunch of Venison, London and Berlin; Mary Boone Gallery, New York; Max Protetch Gallery, New York; SCAI The Bathhouse, Tokyo; and the Phoenix Art Museum, Arizona. His work is included in numerous collections including the Whitney Museum of American Arts, New York; the Guggenheim Museum, New York; the National Gallery of Victoria, Australia; and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, California. Brian Alfred works and lives in Brooklyn, New York.
