Bio
Gary Brewer is an artist, curator, and writer living in Joshua Tree, CA, with a studio in the historic Bendix Building in downtown Los Angeles. Self-taught, in his current practice Brewer creates luminous, richly detailed oil paintings informed in part from his deep passion for nature and art history.
About
I was raised in Southern California, first in the Mojave Desert and then in Orange County. My fascination with the natural world began at an early age.
I had a natural gift for rendering and began to draw the world around me: friends, my neighborhood and nature. In my late teens, I began to study art history, literature, and philosophy.
For many years I was creating abstract paintings, following the lead of Pollock, Rothko, Brice Marden, and others. A shift came in my late 30s, when I felt that I was not getting what I needed from abstraction. One day, in frustration, I made a painting of a green bottle fly, inspired by an illustration I found in a vintage book of natural history. The realistically rendered painting began an entirely new body of work. A few years later, while living in the Oakland hills, I was hiking in a Redwood forest with my five year old son, who took my hat and collected a group of natural objects: acorns, leaves, lichen, and moss. At the end of the walk, he said excitedly, “Dad, you should paint these!” and I thought to myself, “Good idea!”
Looking at these treasures under a magnifying glass, I became fascinated with the complexity of forms, and it stirred something both philosophically and creatively in me. Over the years, I have developed a biomorphic language in both painting and ceramic sculpture that conveys a sense of wonder and mystery.
Curation has been an essential part of my practice as well. My first curatorial project was in 1999 when I organized “THEM: Artists, Scientists and Designers Concerned with the Entomological Universe,” at SoMARTS, San Francisco. This led to another important exhibition: “The Age of Wonder: Artists Engaged with the Natural World,” at Turtle Bay Museum in Redding, CA, in 2011.
Since that time, I have curated ten exhibitions, and my most recent curatorial project was “Vibrant Matter – Brilliant Fire” at Wonzimer Gallery, Los Angeles, in 2024.
In 2017, I began writing essays, studio visits/interviews with artists. I have published over 200 essays in Hyperallergic, Whitehot Magazine and Art and Cake and others. My first book, Eloquent Eye: Studio Visits with Los Angeles Artists, published by Griffith Moon, was released in 2025. My most recent solo exhibition, “Everything is Radiant,” was at Wonzimer Gallery in 2025. Art critic Shana Nys Dambrot reviewed my exhibition writing, “Gary Brewer’s Everything is Radiant, is a selection of paintings and ceramics that emerge from the wellspring of fertile nature and fractal biomorphic amalgamations. Whereas the paintings are known for a succulent, atmospheric hyperrealism in their depictions and evocations of aqueous botanicals in filtered sunlight, the ceramics channel the proliferate, slouching blossoming of lichen, moss, mica, and molten crust on clay, rocks, and soil, in poignant tactility.”