Visual artist and poet John Brooks explores themes of Queer identity, memory, death, and place; his work is centered around questions of contemplation, the expression of emotion, the transformative power and the emotional resonance of particular experiences and what Max Beckmann described as “the deepest feeling about the mystery of being.”
Informed by collage, his paintings are created by combining images from disparate sources: art history, cinema, literature, music, pop culture, and his personal life. Brimming with the richness of the human experience, the resulting tableaus feel paradoxically familiar and entirely new, reflecting both the zeitgeist and what came before. Charged with a sense of longing, remote desire, empathy, as well as a kind of existential openness, the paintings champion the importance of connection, engagement, and presentness.
Part portraiture, part observation, and partly an effort to compile an archive of his ever-expanding global Queer community, Brooks’ drawing practice has blossomed in the last few years. Conceptually aligned with his paintings but aesthetically distinct due to the nature of material differences, these works celebrate individuality, intimacy, tenderness, the autonomy of the self, the tension between confidence and vulnerability, as well as the joy of direct mark-making.
Born in central Kentucky in 1978, Brooks studied political science and English literature at the College of Charleston, South Carolina. His work has been exhibited in the United States and Europe and is held in the collections of Grinnell College Museum of Art, The University of Kentucky Medical Center, OZ Arts, 21C, Beth Rudin DeWoody / The Bunker, and numerous other private collections. Texte Zur Kunst, The New York Review of Books, The Yale Review, and Action, Spectacle have published his paintings and drawings. Brooks’ poetry has been published by Appalachian Review, Pilot Press, Good River Review, Assaracus, East by Northeast, and Plainsongs. He has written for BOMB, Strange Fire Collective, Ruckus Journal, and UnderMain. Over the last two decades, he spent several years in London and Chicago and has been based in Louisville, Kentucky since late 2013. From 2017-2022, Brooks operated Quappi Projects, a contemporary art gallery focusing on exhibiting work reflecting the zeitgeist, where he curated over twenty-five exhibitions.
“Brooks’s historical borrowings are all haunted by the present. His invocations of the aesthetic and erotic freedom of the twenties in Berlin are shadowed by our knowledge of the decades that followed, and by our awareness of the fragility of progress.”
— Garth Greenwell, The New Yorker
“This celebration of queerness is a consistent throughline throughout Brooks’ practice, and this exhibition expands upon that joy, curiosity, and connection in a significant way. Taken as a whole, everything on view is connected by love: love for the artist’s subjects, love of the process, a love of queerness.”
- Andrew Huff, Whitewall
“These are portraits of a community that the artist made some sort of connection with, and the degree to which they caught his eye can vary from lifelong friendships to Instagram discussions about architecture, politics, or queerness. To place this body of work in a contemporary art context it is worth mentioning Elizabeth Payton, a predecessor in that she has been garnishing similar interests in her portraiture paintings, drawings, and prints since the early 1990s.”
- Boshko Boshkovic, UnderMain
“Much like memories, there are parts of each work that have eroded while others remain vivid and sharp; the paintings, as a whole, conjure something that is not fully in the present.”
— Kevin Warth, Ruckus
“Within a spare landscape of grassy beach, the artist stands in a blue Speedo with a black poodle, alert and loyal, to his left. In the foreground, a naked man with his back to the viewer turns to regard us with the suggestion of suspicion. He is right to be guarded: this is not, after all, a painterly imagining of libertine 1930s Berlin, but real life that persists with real dangers for openly gay men. This is Brooks at his most vulnerable and honest, daring to share a beautifully personal moment from his own private museum.”
— Natalie Weis, Burnaway
“Brooks compares the deliberate, blank areas of his canvases to the restraint used in poetry…As readers we must fill in the gaps between words, accordingly there are unpainted areas between the images in Brooks’s paintings. These gaps allow the poetic elements to breathe.”
— Miranda Lash, UnderMain
Selected Press
The New Yorker
John Brooks uses bold colors and found images—of Nick Jonas, Max Beckmann, men he’s met on Instagram—to create a transhistorical community.
Strange Fire Collective
Strange Fire Collective presents Salman Toor in conversation with John Brooks. Toor’s sumptuous and insightful paintings depict intimate, quotidian moments in the lives of fictional, young, queer, brown men ensconced in contemporary cosmopolitan culture. Brooks’ paintings and drawings serve as vessels for moments of human connection, as well as internal realizations.
BOMB Magazine
Pursuing Oddness: A painter moving between drawing and installation
Joan Tanner interviewed by John Brooks
UnderMain
In terms of visual impact, the drawings occupy a substantial space and present a conversation where there is a lot of room to map out relationships among colors, lines, and white space. Each piece shows us the artist’s mastery of color and pattern, the luminosity of utilizing the blank area of a drawing and contrasts between dark and light.
The Yale Review
Embracing the classical and the contemporary, John Brooks’s paintings yearn to create other worlds, a desire that Garth Greenwell argues underlies both art-making and queerness.
WFPL
“The whole exhibition to me feels a little bit like a hug,” says Phillip March Jones, who owns March Gallery and founded Institute 193 in his hometown of Lexington, Ky. “I think the cumulative effect is this kind of embrace, both from nature and these individual portraits.”
Whitewall
The confidence, fluidity, and ease with which Brooks tackles each surface, whether it's portraying the harsh outline of a shadow or patch of wispy chest hair, further reinforces this understanding and profound connection to his subjects, both physically and psychologically.
Under Main
Though you may not think of figurative paintings as overtly performative works, Brooks’ paintings are just that. His canvases are caught up with action and intention, and the notion of representing the elusive and ephemeral. His works perform the actualization of new spaces, both spaces of thought and social spaces to be inhabited with new ideas and feelings. Beyond collapsing the future and past into the present, beyond creating connections that expand common ground, beyond drawing out emotions and affecting audiences, John Brooks’ paintings perform the complex reality of existence in our hyper-connected yet untethered time.
Ruckus
A Map of Scents Review. A Map of Scents currently on display at Moreman Gallery,is the coalescence of John Brooks’ painting, collage, and poetry practices.
Burnaway
In a 2005 interview, architect Oscar Niemeyer confessed, “I prefer to think like André Malraux, who said, ‘I keep inside myself, in my private museum, everything I have seen and loved in my life.’” Artist John Brooks, in his second solo show with Moremen Gallery, appears to share Niemeyer’s affinities.
Dans Les Yeux D’Elsa Art Mag
My interests in art history and politics seem to be converging. I have always been interested in art history—particularly the history of German art from the 10s, 20s, 30s, and 40s —and in this recent body of work purposely chose to bring attention to artists like Beckmann, Kirchner, Dietrich, and Sander because their respective histories and experiences have so much to teach us.
The Voice-Tribune
Authentic Artistry. The opening of Quappi Projects at 1520B Lytle St. on the evening of August 18 was not so much the culmination of John Brooks’ life’s work but rather another milestone from which the renowned artist will only continue to develop.
Leo Weekly
Non-Arrivals by Letitia Quesenberry and John Brooks. “What binds these two bodies of work together is the subtle tension between the promise of an attainable understanding and the elusiveness of the answer,” said artist John Brooks.
AEQAI
Refusals and Offerings: Revolutionary Identity at the Kennedy Heights Art Center. “Revolutionary: Being American Today” advances a poignant, collaborative statement about the contradictions of contemporary U.S. citizenship.
WFPL
At Quappi Projects’ New Gallery Location, The Focus Is On New Perspectives. The new home of Quappi Projects, the gallery opened by John Brooks in 2017, is at the quieter end of East Market Street, set back from the sidewalk behind a narrow walkway of industrial-hip materials.