James Brown

James Brown (1951 LA, Usa- 2020 Merida, Mexico) was an american artist.

Very well known in the 1980s for his rough painterly semi-figurative paintings, bearing affinities to Jean-Michel Basquiat and East Village painting of the time, but with influences from primitive art and classical Western modernism. His work has taken on several styles over the years but maintains a hand-made look combining concerns of the modernist tradition with motifs and spiritual interests from tribal art. Much of his work is a non-realistic but contains depictions or signs of recognizable faces or objects, in the latest paintings he took a more abstract mode.

Selected past exhibitions: ​

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"Terrae Motus" collection, Palazzo Reale di Caserta (1994)

Leo Castelli, New York (1995)

Ex-Escuela Quintana Roo, Mérida, Mexico (2005)

Galerie Karsten Greve, Paris (2007)

Museo Diego Rivera-Anahuacalli, Mexico, Mexique (2013)

Livingstone Gallery, The Hague (2014)

Fisher Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA, USA (2017)

Centro Cultural La Cúpula, Merida, Yucatan, Mexico (2022)

Selected public collections

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MoMA, NY

Whitney Museum of American Art, NY

MET, NY

Centre G.Pompidou in Paris

Kolumba Museum in Cologne

Centre for Contemporary Art of Málaga