If you haven’t yet caught the Moe Brooker exhibit at Sande Webster, there’s still time–until Nov. 4.
The chairman of the city’s Art Commission is no bureaucrat or pol. And judging by the red dots on the price list, he’s surely a collector’s artist. In this time of financial unrest, his work is selling like hotcakes. When I was there, six red dots and one green one bulleted the price list of 22 works, several of the sold ones with $18,000 price tags.
Brooker’s color explosions of joy, light and rhythm are in my mind Vuillard on LSD–liberated from the repressive compression of Vuillard’s interior spaces and yet compositionally suggestive of interior space.
I know this is not necessarily how he thinks of his own work. But when I look at those checkerboards and stripes and fuzzy objects, and even the squiggles of line, I’m put in mind of a modernist living room, with light flooding in and jazz on the stereo. This is the home that design magazines are going for and missing. In one fell swoop, Brooker achieves cool and cozy and hot. Now there’s a trick.
Roberta wrote an essay on Brooker for the catalog of his exhibit at June Kelly Gallery in New York in 2006. It’s on the blog.
