Image courtesy of the artist:
a winter trip to Northern Denmark with Frodo

Paul Brainard

Paul Brainard was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania where he studied at the University of Pittsburgh for a Bachelor’s degree in painting and drawing with a minor in Art History and Psychology. After studying at the Carnegie Institute Museum studio school, he moved to New York in 1996 to attend Pratt Institute where he received his MFA in painting and drawing.

He has exhibited widely in the United States and Internationally at the Second Street Gallery (Charlottesville, VA), Lodge Gallery (NYC), 31 Grand Gallery (NYC), Freight and Volume and Arts and Leisure (NYC), Deitch Projects (NYC) Allegra LaViola Gallery (NYC), Guerrero Gallery (San Francisco, CA), and Andrew Edlin Gallery (NYC). In 2010, his European debut solo show Living Dead at Dvorak Sec Gallery in Prague was well received and reviewed. Solo exhibitions of Brainard’s work include It’s about fucking time at the Royal Society of American Art (Brooklyn, NY - 2022), Covid Kids Club at The Java Project (Brooklyn, NY - 2020), My body is a grave at Second Street Gallery (Charlottesville, VA - 2017), and Swamp Hockey at Arts & Leisure (New York City, NY - 2017). In March 2016, he exhibited in solo booth with The Lodge Gallery at VOLTA Art Fair in New York. In January 2018, he showed at Galleri Oxholm in Copenhagen. His work was exhibited in Subculture Shock: Death, Punk, and the Occult in Contemporary Art, a group exhibition at Second Street Gallery in 2019. He has also curated many painting shows in New York, Totally Gay for Sports (2013) at The Lodge Gallery, True Faith (2007) and Breed (2011) at the Greenberg Van Doren Gallery, and Die like you really mean it (2011) at Allegra LaViola Gallery.

Brainard’s work has developed into a myriad of collage-like imagery from random sources that culminate in a fragmented flotsam of American culture. This combination of recognizable imagery and seemingly erratic thoughts and behavior strive to capture the ennui of contemporary human existence.

“My most recent group of drawings originated out of my need to understand the sudden and tragic death of my close friend Frodo Mikkelsen. As I tried to process the overwhelming feeling of grief, I channeled my energy and anger into working on new pieces. Frodo was a Danish artist and we grew to be close friends over time as we both pursued the themes of mortality and impermanence of life in our art. I am forever grateful for getting to know him as an artist and as a friend. Throughout our friendship, we worked to help each other exhibit in our respective cities, New York and Copenhagen. In January 2024, I traveled to Aars in Northern Denmark to speak about my work presented as part of the show curated by Frodo at Himmerlands Kunstmuseum. The exhibit was titled Se i mørke (To See in the Dark), a reference to the challenges of life in the north in the wintertime, but also a metaphor for mortality and the promise of hope. Less than two weeks later, Frodo was gone leaving the many who loved him heartbroken and confused. In this suite of drawings, I evoke an abstracted Northern Denmark landscape of icy fields, Viking burial mounds, abandoned Nazi bunkers and Østerild Wind Turbines in the frozen fjords. Through these works, I strive to envision an alternative existence where different choices could have been made and different paths could have been chosen, and imagining a world where Frodo is still alive.”