Collection: Roger Brown

Roger Brown (1941–1997, Hamilton, Alabama) was an American painter whose practice from the late 1960s onwards developed a highly distinctive visual language of flattened, patterned landscapes, silhouetted figures, architectural forms and popular imagery rooted in the vernacular traditions of American folk art, theatre, advertising and the decorative arts. Studying at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Brown emerged as one of the central figures of Chicago Imagism, the loose grouping of artists associated with the city’s art scene in the late 1960s and 1970s who shared a commitment to figurative, narrative and often darkly humorous imagery in deliberate opposition to the dominant abstraction of the New York art world.

His paintings of the early 1970s — including the patterned landscape series that brought him to international attention — used repeated, rhythmic forms to create images of hypnotic visual intensity. Rows of undulating hills, waves, clouds and architectural elements were populated by tiny, isolated figures whose anonymity and repetition gave the work a quality simultaneously comic and melancholic. His solo exhibitions with Phyllis Kind Gallery in Chicago from 1971 onwards established his reputation, and his first European solo exhibition at Galerie Darthea Speyer, Paris, in 1974 marked the beginning of his international profile.

Brown’s later work extended his visual vocabulary into increasingly complex social and political territory, incorporating imagery drawn from natural disaster, urban life, religion and American popular culture. His estate and studio are maintained as the Roger Brown Study Collection at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. His work is held in major collections including the Art Institute of Chicago and the Smithsonian American Art Museum.