James Brinsfield "Beppo", oil, oil stick, pencil on canvas, 78" x 64", 2021
James Brinsfield "UFO", oil, oil stick, pencil on canvas, 80" x 64", 2022
James Brinsfield "Space Mob", oil, enamel, marker on linen, 78" x 66", 2020
James Brinsfield "Huffa Puffa", oil and enamel on primed canvas, 78" x 64", 2021
James Brinsfield "Echoplex", oil, enamel on canvas, 78" x 62", 2020
James Brinsfield, "Ametora", oil and enamel on primed canvas, 84" x 60", 2019
James Brinsfield, "Hat and Beard", oil and enamel on primed linen, 84" x 60", 2019
James Brinsfield, Untitled A, oil and pencil on Bienfang paper, 17" x 14", 2019
James Brinsfield, Untitled B, oil and pencil on Bienfang paper, 17" x 14", 2019
James Brinsfield, Untitled C, oil and pencil on Bienfang paper, 17" x 14", 2019
James Brinsfield, Untitled D, oil and pencil on Bienfang paper, 17" x 14", 2019
James Brinsfield, Untitled E, oil and pencil on Bienfang paper, 17" x 14", 2019
James Brinsfield, Untitled F, oil and pencil on Bienfang paper, 17" x 14", 2019
James Brinsfield, Untitled G, oil and pencil on Bienfang paper, 17" x 14", 2019
James Brinsfield, "Long Division", oil, pencil, enamel, enamel marker on linen, 76" x 60", 2017
Abstraction - a refinement of thoughts by the artist. Here, in the first of the division series in 2017, Jim was thinking of political and cultural divisions in the United States and elsewhere. Think about the vertical divider in the painting and what might be happening on either side. Is there an overarching zeitgeist that prevails over both?
James Brinsfield, "Tiergarten", oil paint on canvas, 78" x 62", 2011
James Brinsfield "Dust Off", oil on canvas, 78" x 62", 2014 (private collection)
James Brinsfield "Good Citizenship", oil on canvas, 60" x 80", 2008
No Ticket - No Ride
oil and enamel on canvas, 48" x 72", 2007
James Brinsfield, untitled, oil on paper, 17" x 14", 2017
James Brinsfield, untitled, oil on paper, 17" x 14", 2017
James Brinsfield, untitled, oil on panel, 24" x 20", 2016
James Brinsfield, untitled, oil on panel, 24" x 20", 2016
James Brinsfield, untitled, oil on canvas, 82" x 64", 2016
James Brinsfield was born in Chicago and lived in Massachusetts and Germany as the son of a career military officer. He earned a BFA from the University of Illinois at Chicago and an MFA in painting.
Brinsfield has had many solo exhibitions thus far in his career including exhibitions in Chicago, Kansas City, Los Angeles, and Washington, D.C. His work has been critically reviewed nationally including in Art in America, Art News, Flash Art, and Contemporanea magazines; and in the Chicago Tribune, Kansas City Star, and Washington Post.
His paintings are in numerous public and private collections including the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, MO, the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Overland Park, KS and the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, MO. For many years, he was a lecturer in the Painting department of the Kansas City Art Institute.
In 2018, we exhibited a twenty year retrospective of Mr. Brinsfield's paintings. Read the essay by James Martin for the restrospective exhibition - link is below the resume at the right. See our Exhibitions page for more information on that exhibition.
See below on our News page for news on Mr. Brinsfield. From 2020 through early 2024, Mr. Brinsfield has been busy in the studio creating many new small scale paintings and then moving on to larger scaled paintings.
Also see our YouTube channel for three interesting video interviews with Mr. Brinsfield on aspects of his work.
STATEMENT
James Brinsfield (b. 1949, Chicago, IL) has developed a visual vernacular that draws from the art historical canon and the artist's personal history. Brinsfield continually reinvents his paintings and drawings with a profound fluency in iconic modes of art making that he employs to elegantly move through genres from Modernist Abstraction, to Minimalism, and the gestural mark-making of Abstract Expressionism. His conversance with these influences frees him to explore these concepts and make them his own. His production never seems to be rooted in certainty; rather, the works evolve, sometimes radically from the start of a work to its conclusion embracing the relational nature of the act of painting.
SAD NEWS
James (Jim) Brinsfield, who had been fighting cancer this spring and summer, passed away on Saturday, September 21, 2024 in his studio with his partner Alice Thorson at his side. We give you this news with sadness, but also with the privilege of having known him as a friend and a great artist. A memoriam written by David Cateforis is Here
In late Spring 2024, Jim sent us a set of small paintings on gallery paper mounted on board that we will be displaying at the gallery through the end of the year.
Solo Exhibitions
2018 James Brinsfield - a Twenty Year Retrospective, Joseph Nease Gallery, Duluth, MN
2014 Self-Titled, Haw Contemporary, Kansas City, MO
2011 James Brinsfield 2007-2011, The Albrecht-Kemper Museum of Art, St. Joseph, MO
2010 Dolphin Gallery, Kansas City, MO
2007 Jan Weiner Gallery, Kansas City, MO
2005 Jan Weiner Gallery
2003 Acuna-Hansen Gallery, Los Angeles, CA
2002 Lovely Mover, Joseph Nease Gallery, Kansas City, MO
2000 Post Abstraction, Joseph Nease Gallery
1998 True North, Joseph Nease Gallery
1994 David Levik Gallery, Kansas City, Missouri
1992 Morgan Gallery, Kansas City, Missouri
1990 Anton Gallery, Washington, D.C.
1988 Anton Gallery
1986 Anton Gallery
1985 Asperger-Bischof Gallery, Chicago, Illinois
1983 Feature Gallery, Chicago, Illinois
1982 Nancy Lurie Gallery, Chicago, Illinois
1981 Nancy Lurie Gallery
Selected Group Exhibitions
2024 Small Paintings, Joseph Nease Gallery, Duluth, MN
2023 Distant Context, Joseph Nease Gallery, Duluth, MN
2021 Ongoing, Joseph Nease Gallery, Duluth, MN
2018 Anxious Abstraction, Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Overland Park, KS (see the News page)
2013 OPEN, Haw Contemporary, Kansas City, Missouri
2013 Thanks for the Warning, the Dolphin Gallery, Kansas City, Missouri
2012 The Oppenheimer Collection @20, Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Overland Park, Kansas
2012 Abstraction Kansas City, Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art
2012 Liberty, the Dolphin Gallery, Kansas City, Missouri.
2011 America Now + Here, Leedy-Voulkos Art Center, Kansas City, Missouri
2011 What’s Up, the Dolphin Gallery
2010 New Digs, the Dolphin Gallery
2009 Interchange, Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, Missouri.
2009 The Francis and Julia Spiezer Collection, Rockford Art Museum, Rockford, Illinois.
2009 Resonate, Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art
2008 About Abstraction, Salina Center for the Arts, Salina, Kansas, curated by Heather Ferrell.
2008 Conversation Pieces, Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, curated by Chris Cook.
2008 5x7, Austin Arthouse, Austin, Texas
2008 Inman Gallery, Houston Texas, curated by Elizabeth Dunbar.
2007 Allusive Abstraction, Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, curated by Bruce Hartman.
2005 New Acquisitions, Gallery of Art, Johnson County Community College
2003 Is/Was, Joseph Nease Gallery, Kansas City, MO.
2001 Space Oddity, Joseph Nease Gallery
1999 Perspective Kansas City, Gallery of Art, Johnson County Community College, curated by Raphael Rubinstein.
1997 Perspective Kansas City, Gallery of Art, Johnson County Community College, curated by Dan Cameron.
1995 50 Years of Chicago Art, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, Illinois.
1982 New Figuration in America, Milwaukee Art Museum, curated by Russel Bowman.
1978 Chicago and Vicinity Show, Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois. Curated by Roberta Smith and James Speyer.
We are pleased that this great painting is moving to a growing, local private collection.
James Brinsfield has been busy in the studio this year. He has made several new paintings on paper (17" x 14") and sometimes they are a basis to loosely scale up to a big canvas painting.
James Brinsfield has been busy in the studio in 2019 and has recently completed two new major paintings. Both are being exhibited this month in Kansas City at Museo, a high end furnishing retail location. If you are in the area, hope you can stop in and see them paired with appropriate interior furnishings. See James' artist page on our website, or our Artsy site for full images of these two 2019 paintings - "Ametora" and "Hat and Beard".
In conjunction with James Brinsfield - A Twenty Year Retrospective, James Martin has written a thoughtful essay about the work and how Brinsfield's abstract painting has cultural relevancy. We invite you to read the essay at this link.
We open James Brinsfield, a retrospective of work over the past 20 years, to the public on June 23. We will be heading down to Kansas City to select the work for this exhibition late this month. This will be an interesting exhibition to see the evolution of this painter's work over a long period, and we will bring out some gems not seen in public for a long time.
Jim is currently part of "Anxious Abstraction" at the Nerman Museum (see News item below). He is painting a new work for the exhibition as the painting at right (detail shown) is going to a collection in Houston.
"Anxious times breed anxious art..." writes Alice Thorson about this six person group exhibit "Anxious Abstraction" at the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art in Overland Park, Kansas. Mr. Brinsfield is one of six national artists included in the exhibition. At right is a detail of "Blue Vase" 2017, one of Brinsfield's included paintings. A link to the Nerman exhibition page is below.
Mr. Brinsfield will have his first exhibition at JNG V2.0 in Duluth, MN in early summer 2018. Prior to that, stop in and see some of his work already in the gallery. For some background, see the 2011 interview of Mr. Brinsfield with Dr. David Cateforis.
A cropped studio view at right from late 2016 with work in progress.
