Brendan Fowler (b. 1978)

Brendan Fowler (b. 1978)
Fall 2009 (Fall 2008 West coast Tour Posters - C, Flowers on Walk with Andrea/ Terry/ Cindy 1)
signed and dated 'Brendan Fowler 11/09' (on the stretcher)
digital C-prints, silkscreen ink on paper, in artist's frame
42⅞ x 40¾ x 5⅞in. (109 x 103.5 x 15cm.)
Executed in 2009

Provenance:
Untitled, New York.
Private Collection, London.

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Specialist Notes:

Part photography, sculpture and performance, Brendan Fowler’s Fall 2009 (Fall 2008 West coast Tour Posters - C, Flowers on Walk with Andrea/ Terry/ Cindy 1) is one of his signature ‘crash’ works. The work was conceived the same year the artist exhibited other works from the series in the New Museum’s Younger Than Jesus triennial. In his signature works, Brendan Fowler combines up to four framed pictures and ‘crashes’ them together.

A student of free-jazz, Fowler’s interest in improvisation, chance and performance are key motifs in his practice. ‘I studied and for a large part of my life was really involved in free jazz’ Fowler explains, ‘Improvisation is still important. If you picture like, three or four or five people playing really discordant atonal music, that really magic moment does happen sometimes, where everybody hits together. I started to think of the sculptures as freezing that moment. All these planes crashing together’ (B. Fowler, quoted in F. Gavin ‘Q&A/Art: Brendan Fowler: Free-jazz sculptures and The Nothingness of Flowers’, in Dazed).

Largely autobiographical, the three-dimensional pictures combine snapshots of his friends, arrangements of flowers, the artist’s studio, mirrors, and screens in restructured narratives. Fowler juxtaposes the deeply personal (Walk with Andrea/Terry/Cindy) with the specifications of his artistic production and his music (West coast Tour Posters). The flowers, which Fowler describes as ‘the ultimate exhausted signifier of aesthetics in the history of the world’ act to discourage any reading of these works as autobiographical but instead as aesthetic objects bringing together a range of media and genres to form one moment of inspiration (B. Fowler, quoted in F. Gavin ‘Q&A/Art: Brendan Fowler: Free-jazz sculptures and The Nothingness of Flowers’, in Dazed).

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