Artist Walkthrough - Saturday, January 13th, 2pm
The world, objects, bodies, my very soul are, from the time of their birth, adrift... The drift is the whole of time: the dawn of appearance, a life marked out by finitude, disintegration, the aleatory fragmentation of multiple temporalities in infinite space.
-Michel Serres, from The Birth of Physics
DIMIN is pleased to present a new group of large-scale works by abstract painter Brennen Steines. Referring to the process of creating the work, Dispersion Field distills multiple meanings of the “field”, as it relates to physics, landscape, and the history of painting.
Matter speaks. It speaks through the elemental interactions of density, flow, and resistance; acted upon by the forces of gravity, time, and motion. New forms rise and fall; coalesce and disperse, from chaos to order and back again. The landscape discloses the traces of this history. Magma meets the cool air and seas to form new earth. Liquid flows over the terrain, slowly carving channels and canyons. Subterranean minerals shift, collide, and transform. The built environment undergoes this alchemical drama as well. Steel bears the patterns of its own corrosion. A fter all, entropy is the cosmos reclaiming itself to be reborn. How can painting register the dynamic fluxes and flows of this elemental dance? Brennen Steines’ metallic topographies speak to the haunting sublime of material transformation.
Process is central to Steines’ work. Utilizing a confluence of chance-based processes and responsive decisions, he creates abstract landscapes that become visceral records of their own creation. For the artist, painting is a way to meditate on the alchemical qualities of the medium’s materiality. Layers of oil, limestone, and metal are added to the substrate, creating a geological sedimentation of pigment on the surface, not dissimilar to dried riverbeds. Emulsive solutions are then applied to the surface of the paintings and evaporate into forms that recall micro and macrocosmic terrains. The shimmering traces of pigment resemble tidal pools, industrial surfaces, geologic formations, and cellular topographies.
More than material effects, Steines’ work elicits a feeling of our contemporary climate. The elemental fusion of crackling stone, metal alloys, and ambient atmosphere, speaks to geological time and transience. Strata, fog, turbidity, soot, glimmer, and rust all come to mind as textures of the Anthropocene, ideas which inform this body of work. Steines’ paintings oscillate between organic and synthetic, becoming topographical terrains that expose the traces of their own history. The work thus becomes a site where past and present converge; an act of transmutation where base material is transformed into an object of aesthetic contemplation.
Brennen Steines (b. 1993, Rockford, IL.) currently lives and works in New Haven, CT. He received an MFA from Yale School of Art in 2022 and a BFA from University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee in 2018. Steines attended the Saas-Fee Summer Institute of Art in 2022 and he was a Yale University CCAM Blended Reality Studio Fellow from 2021 - 2022. Steines was awarded the Elizabeth Canfield Hicks Award from Yale University for outstanding achievement in drawing and painting from nature. He attended the Yale Norfolk School of Art through the Ellen Battell Stoeckel fellowship in 2017. His work has been shown at the Museum of Wisconsin Art, South Bend, WI; Dimin, New York, NY; Jeffrey Deitch, New York, NY; Green Hall Gallery, New Haven, CT; The Alice Wilds, Milwaukee, WI; Usable Space, Milwaukee, WI; and Galerie Kenilworth, Milwaukee, WI. His work is included in the public collection of the Museum of Wisconsin Art.
DIMIN is located in Tribeca at 406 Broadway, Fl. 2, New York, NY. DIMIN is open Tuesday to Saturday, 11am to 6pm.
For all inquiries, please contact gallery@dimin.nyc.
