The Agnes Martin Underground

My current painting work emerges through a process of painterly “stigmergy” – a kind of swarm intelligence with each step directly informing and directing the next. From initially drawing and painting on paper, lines become forms which grow through enlarging and redrawing, sampling and mathematically dividing.

These steps in turn systematically inform the next- to creating prints of existing segments, tattooing them to each other, painting washes and drawing over those while following the forms and directives of the process until imagery is built up into episodic panoramas and sealed within a varnished outer atmosphere.

The antecedents of the work draw from the expansive, inky scrolls of Great Age Chinese landscape painting and diagrammatic abstraction, childhood entomology, plate tectonics, the petroleum industry's hold on paleontology, weather supersystems, nuclear seepage, particle swarm theory, speleogenesis, transparency in jellyfish and the inner workings of air conditioners. My work creates scenarios where we can contemplate the new vistas – an overlook onto science's unrelenting invasion of the body, the IV drip of technology into contemporary art and life, the aberrant mutations of nature in a landscape marinating in the chemical runoff of progress.

Brad Hampton was born in Detroit, Michigan and lives and works in New York City. He studied Linguistics and Art History at New York University, Ruprecht-Karls Universität in Heidelberg, Germany and the Sorbonne in Paris, France. Brad received his MFA in Painting from Parsons New School of Design in New York and attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2003.

Love Alluvial Veneer

Since 2004, Brad's work has been exhibited by Massimo Audiello, Sandra Gering, Samson Projects, Marlborough Gallery, Artists Space, 1708 Gallery in Richmond, VA and at the Electronics Alive IV Biennial in Tampa, FL. Solo exhibitions have been mounted at Seo Hwa Gallery in Seoul, South Korea and at the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Michigan. Brad's work has been featured in two editions of New American Paintings as well as Art in America, The Village Voice and Artworld Digest. He has contributed reviews to Art in America and written catalogue essays for numerous artists.