Jeff Brouws: Just About Everything, Someplace Else
october 17 - Decemebr 6, 2024
PRESS RELEASE | images
Robert Mann Gallery is pleased to announce our return to Chelsea, the vibrant art community where we first relocated to in 1999.
For the inaugural exhibition in our new gallery space, and in celebration of our 25+ year relationship with artist Jeff Brouws, Robert Mann Gallery is pleased to announce Jeff Brouws: Just About Everything, Someplace Else, on view from October 17 - December 6, 2024. This exhibition will showcase a selection of Brouws’s iconic photographs alongside several previously unseen works.
In Just About Everything, Someplace Else, Jeff Brouws brings together images that act as artifacts of history while continuing to speak to themes that resonant today: a sense of abandonment, loneliness, alienation, and the influence of technological change, in essence all suggestive of an American Dream that isn’t quite what it seems. In this show Brouws incorporates photographs from several series including his Ed Ruscha-influenced Language in the the Landscape, the Hopperesque images from the series Approaching Nowhere, and the discarded and franchised elements of our collective commercial environments that pay homage to, and update, the New Topographics.
Throughout his career Brouws has created a rich archive with an emphasis on documenting our built environment, a practice that he terms “visual anthropology.” In preserving the remnants of the American landscape he has created a photographic anthology that allows us to see the impact of economic and social forces as they play out, especially across non-urban areas of America. In these images a connecting thread is the highway, a central character and place upon which so much of American life unfolds.
Brouws's photographs are included in the permanent collections of The Whitney Museum of American Art, The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, The J. Paul Getty Museum, among others. His monographs include Approaching Nowhere (2006), Readymades (2003), Inside the Live Reptile Tent (2001), and Highway: Americaʼs Endless Dream (1998). He is also the co-editor and co-creator of Various Small Books: Referencing Various Small Books by Ed Ruscha (2013, MIT Press).
Born in 1955, Brouws lives in Stanfordville, New York.
Please contact the gallery to arrange a viewing, or view the exhibition online, from October 17 - December 6, 2024. For additional information and press materials, please contact the gallery by email (mail@robertmann.com).
Jeff Brouws’ New Exhibition Unravels The Truth Behind The American Dream
BY THE Phoblographer
Human-built spaces have stories written in every brick building, lamp post, or even the concrete roads with speed bumps. The way our environment has changed since industrialization and is continuously transforming says a lot about us and our relationship with one another. There was a point when intricate designs adored buildings, but now, glass facades and minimalism aesthetics are taking over.