Robert Mann Gallery comes back to Chelsea, the vibrant art community where they first relocated to in 1999.
For the inaugural exhibition in their new gallery space, and in celebration of their 25+ year relationship with artist Jeff Brouws, Robert Mann Gallery presents Jeff Brouws: Just About Everything, Someplace Else, on view until December 6, 2024. This exhibition showcases 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’ 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.
Jeff Brouws : Just About Everything, Someplace Else
October 17 – December 6, 2024
Robert Mann Gallery
508 W 26th St Suite 9F
New York, NY 10001
www.robertmann.com
