GAVLAK is pleased to participate in the Independent art fair for the first time with a solo booth of new works by New York-based artist, Andrew Brischler. This body of work, which recently made its debut during Brischler’s solo exhibition in Palm Beach, marks a figurative shift for the artist, who has become well known for graphic works that bring together graphic design, popular culture, and queer iconography.

With this presentation, Brischler, a reliable author of orderly geometries and typographic motifs, turns to the human form. His approach, though, will be comfortingly familiar to those who have been following his work, one that relishes in the outsize influence media and pop culture have on our visual landscape and psyche.

The suite of works that comprise the Self Portraits wear Brischler’s cinematic influences on their sleeve. Rather than just nod to or obscure their sources, they reproduce them wholesale. They are in essence film stills though rendered through a highly graphic sensibility: halftone dots to give them the patina of printed matter or the mechanical feel of silkscreen printmaking. The apparent slickness of these surfaces is a ruse; the pictures are painstakingly labored over by hand, a pulsating field of colored pencil strokes over a gouache ground. Here is Sigourney Weaver in Alien awash in green, a violet Michelle Pfeiffer in Scarface, Milla Jovovich in The Fifth Element behind a cadmium yellow scrim. 

As part of Independent, GAVLAK will also present a site-specific work by New York-based artist, Maynard Monrow.

Language has been a key subject for Monrow for the past two decades. His use of text as image in various media expose the intersection and often fallibility of both representational systems. Monrow asserts that the role of art goes beyond reinforcing conventional ideals of beauty; instead, it has the power to establish alternative structures and frameworks, facilitating a broader and more inclusive perspective. This philosophy is represented in works such as “Be Reasonable, Demand the Impossible”, where the work dictates its content, allowing its viewer to re-interpret it based on her or his own experiences.