Brian Caraway: Divine Madness 

June 2–July 27, 2017

Chandra Cerrito Contemporary is pleased to announce two concurrent solo exhibitions of works by Bay Area artists Brian Caraway and Mitra Fabian from June 2 to July 27, 2017.  In Caraway’s Divine Madness and Fabian’s Natural Conduct, paintings and sculptural works explore the richness of repetition.

Brian Caraway’s acrylic paintings are inspired by skateboarding culture, mathematical patterns, and the polyrhythms of modern music.  Caraway uses a clean, controlled visual language that draws from 1960’s California hard-edge painting, color-field painters like Barnett Newman, and op-artists like Bridget Riley.  Bands of vivid color of varying widths are masked off to create clear demarcations.  Their linear patterns are devised through systems related to both math and musical rhythms.  In some works, gradually diminishing or expanding bands create illusions of warped space; in others, visual vibrations result from interference between adjacent colors.  Recently, Caraway has employed early skills he learned from building skateboard ramps to construct wood panels that are sloped or curved, emphasizing their sculptural quality and adding another dimension to the flatness or illusory space of the painted surface.

Brian Caraway was born and raised in Southern California.  He moved to the Bay Area to attend San Francisco State University, where he earned a BA in Painting and Printmaking in 2000.  In 2009 he earned an MFA from Mills College in Oakland.  Caraway has been showing actively throughout the Bay Area as well as in Portland, OR and Brooklyn, NY since 2004.  Exhibitions include those at the Kala Art Institute in Berkeley, Root Division in San Francisco, San Francisco Arts Commission Gallery, Richmond Art Center, Amp Gallery in Brooklyn, and Art Market San Francisco as well as installations at Grace Cathedral in San Francisco and Art on First, a series of temporary public art installations in Napa.  He has been awarded the Herringer Prize, the Nell-Stinton Grant and a residency at Kala Art Institute.  This is Caraway’s sixth exhibition and second solo exhibition at Chandra Cerrito Contemporary.

EXHIBITION GALLERY