Kadar Brock

Kadar Brock’s large-scale abstractions counteract the expectation that all great artists protect a subconscious genius to be used in their practice. His labor-intensive paintings are equally additive and subtractive, mechanical and gestural. He arms himself with a power-sander and employs it to distress and redefine his “failed paintings”—older works from a series of drip paintings he created with voluminous, brightly colored squirts of paint. Each chance movement is determined by a set of Dungeons & Dragons dice, with the results being applied to his predetermined parameters. The artist’s hand is invisible but inescapable in these minimal canvases, which often include large holes and remnants of color that resemble layers of bedrock. Brock avoids the artistic decisions the canvas traditionally demands and revels in the potential an artwork has to fail and be revitalized—even if it comes dangerously close to the point of destruction.

Brock has shown his works at the Indianapolis Museum of Contemporary Art, Indiana, Hudson Valley Center for Contemporary Art, Peekskill, New York, and Detroit MOCA, Michigan, among many other international gallery exhibitions.