KINGMAN Brant
Brant KINGMAN, American sculptor, an atypical career
"Making art for love
In New York I had lived certain of my imminent death. I felt the omnipresence of death in the form of a huge vacuum cleaner ready to take me through the air. This sensation was more stimulating than oppressive. I was obsessed with drawing and painting, just like it was the only thing left for me to do before I died. After the attack I moved to my hometown of Minneapolis and that feeling disappeared. At first life seemed to me empty, devoid of interest and too sweet. But something surprising filled that void.
It was love. I had fallen in love with a Chilean dancer I met before my departure. We are married after two years of commuting between the two cities. We settled in a secluded house in the countryside around which I created a very beautiful garden.
A year after our marriage our son was born. Suddenly life became very real. The violence and dark colors that marked my early paintings disappeared and were replaced by more colorful and cheerful images. The artistic community in Minneapolis was not big enough to sustain me. My New York contacts weren't interested in a non-resident artist.
I needed a job. I did not want to associate my art with a simple livelihood, and entered the world of finance for which I discovered a certain talent. In less than two years I had become the vice president of business finance within a company where I was in charge of "mergers and acquisitions". Although I had to adapt to the norms, I was not necessarily conventional. A few times during the winter I would go to work on sail skates, like in this photo in 1990."
Brant Kingman: Contemporary Relics
"In sculpture, the basic subjects, from the most primitive times to the present day, have always adopted the human or anthropomorphic appearance. My work follows this tradition but tends towards a new approach to the human body by deliberately destructuring a form to which I adds a new mode of reading by setting up cultural iconography in relief.
The sculptures that emerge from this metamorphosis are contemporary relics that contain what I call "cultural fossils".
The development of contemporary relics and cultural fossils was for me an evolutionary process. My working style, in my early days, focused on classic forms, continuous surfaces, to define solid figures.
I was led to create contemporary relics by observing in my studio, the progressive disintegration of classical sculptures made of unbaked clay. I liked the look of these transformed works and so I deliberately began to distort my work. I found a way to make the interior of these sculptures as visible as the exterior. The result is a classic form reduced to its simplest identification, in this case, the human torso.
The next step was inspired by my desire to incorporate my collection of religious icons and other cultural artifacts into this work. I realized that the association of objects with forms, brought an increased value to the whole. Much of what you see of my work is evidence of my desire to create a surface of nested-objects-in-relief, which I call cultural fossils.
Each sculpture marks a milestone in my development and a turning point as I explored the immense potential of the human soul."
Brant Kingman - Contemporary Relics
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Artist presented by the Art and Miss Gallery - Paris
