In his debut solo exhibition at McClain Gallery, Brendan Cass presents a new group of landscape paintings. Employing gestural mark making and a bold relationship with color and light, Cass's paintings are brazenly imaginative depictions of the land that he captures, in this particular body of work: Texas. Sweeping exuberant swaths of color across expansive canvas, Cass finds ways to both corral movement and allow freedom for the land to express itself through abstraction and an unbridled style.
The joy of painting is evident in each tactile drip, playful blob and layered brushstroke, as is the sophistication of the artist's hand. While these works are celebrations of painting, they are also intoxicatingly atmospheric: the acid palette for which Cass is known is here sometimes subdued for moodier night-time hues: violet, midnight blues and silver white - the things lightening fields are made of. Straying from his signature uniformly large-scale canvases, this new group of works vary in size, from smaller, more intimate snapshots to panoramic views of city skylines and dramatic plains.
Brendan Cass (b.1974) attended the School of Visual Arts, New York and the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts, Bard College. He has had solo shows in London, Sweden, Tenerife, Brussels, and New York, and has had group shows worldwide, including at the New Museum, New York, and Sotheby's Benefit for Free Art for Children. His work has been reviewed in Art in America, Art Review, ARTFORUM and The New York Times. He currently lives and works in Cornwall Bridge, Connecticut.