Collection: James Brown

James Brown (Los Angeles, 1951 – Mexico City, 2020) was an American artist with a nomadic and syncretic gaze, capable of intertwining the roots of Western painting with ancestral symbolism, non-European cultural codes, and materials steeped in memory. A painter, printmaker, and experimenter active for over four decades, Brown lived and worked between the United States, France, Italy, and especially Mexico, where he established his own studio and founded a creative hub rooted in traditional craftsmanship and printmaking.

Trained between California and Paris in the 1970s, he absorbed the lessons of Abstract Expressionism, Primitivism, and the historical European avant-garde, distilling them into a personal, spiritual, and deeply symbolic style of painting. His works are recognized by their archaic and vibrant style, an earthy and natural palette, and a recurring use of totemic motifs, stylized faces, mental maps, and imaginary alphabets.

In the international art scene of the 1980s, dominated by the return to painting and the Transavanguardia, James Brown established himself as an independent voice, with a series of exhibitions in New York, Paris, and Germany. While engaging with figures such as Jean-Michel Basquiat and Francesco Clemente, Brown rejected any label, pursuing his research outside the mainstream. In the 1990s, he moved to southern Mexico, to the region of Oaxaca, where he developed a practice centered on the dialogue between contemporary art and popular traditions, founding a printing house and a workshop for the production of artists' books, Carpe Diem Press, with his wife Alexandra.

His painting evolves over time from a nervous and material gesture towards a more rarefied synthesis, made of geometric rhythms, mnemonic patterns, and backgrounds that evoke sacred textures or inner maps. The image is never mere representation, but a vehicle for knowledge, meditation, or evocation. His works appear as secular relics, tools of spiritual orientation, objects that speak of collective rites and forgotten memories.

James Brown has exhibited at prestigious international institutions, and his works are now part of the permanent collections of museums such as MoMA in New York, the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Reina Sofia in Madrid, and the Museo Tamayo in Mexico City. His passing in 2020 marked the loss of a profound and coherent artist, whose work continues to inspire for its ability to integrate aesthetics, thought, and spirituality into a universal and timeless language.