Work

My work explores painting as a place of interaction and reflection where human presence completes the work.

The Installation paintings approach a scale normally reserved for sculpture and architecture. As in architecture the materials and means of the paintings serve to define the surrounding space rather than fictive space.

Large Paintings

The physical construction of the smaller paintings and the immersive color space of the installation paintings both emerged from an on-going series of large paintings begun in 1998.

Small Paintings

There is an intimacy in these small paintings. Densely layered over a period of years, a balance of color and mark emerges denying illusory space. The paintings project a presence not unlike a portrait – an abstract gaze. In each I seek a separate, poetic whole that faces the viewer with presence and clarity, alive in the insistent, evident humanity of its construction.

Text Works

These works in paper manipulate the scale of language in texts by Melville, Proust, and the poets St. Jean Perse and Paul Celan. In each work the component letters of a given word achieve visual and spatial independence - letters, punctuation, and blank spaces are equally weighted - each taking its place on a single page.

Skull Drawings

Skulls and self-portraits share not only a rich history as vanitas subject matter but are also complex forms that sustain perceptual and material engagement. In this series of drawings, which includes self-portraits and skulls, gestures derived from a representational under-drawing are amplified and repeated, transforming an allusive symbol into a tangible passage of time.

Self Drawings

Curriculum Vitae

"Brett Baker’s work is full of dualities that are not exclusive of one another; not either/or, but this/and.

The most obvious of these is the distinction between the easel-scaled high-impasto paintings consisting of repeated bars of dim but saturated color, and the room-scaled installation paintings, in which a monumental canvas is propped a few feet from a gallery wall, creating a long corridor of color, painted on one side and reflected from the other.

Together these two bodies of work signify his simultaneous commitment to the materiality and immateriality of color."

- Vittorio Colaizzi

" ...the language of painting explores itself. Thick stripes assiduously accrue as though marking time without expectation... The image becomes an account of the authenticity it seeks."

- Margaret McCann

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Work