Brett de Palma
Brett de Palma (b. 1949) is an American Postwar and Contemporary painter based in New York. He describes the artworks that he creates as “witnesses created to reflect the their time and place.” De Palma’s alternately humorous and emotionally charged paintings, the artist samples from history and pop culture in searing, electric colour. He draws inspiration from the vibrant downtown scene of new York during the 1980s, which results in his work melding the principles of painting with punk aesthetics. He further describes his work as “anxious abstractions from the tension between the physical body interacting with the space it inhabits and the objects it encounters.”
Brett de Palma (b. 1949) is an American Postwar and Contemporary painter based in New York. He describes the artworks that he creates as "witnesses created to reflect the their time and place." De Palma’s alternately humorous and emotionally charged paintings, the artist samples from history and pop culture in searing, electric colour. He draws inspiration from the vibrant downtown scene of new York during the 1980s, which results in his work melding the principles of painting with punk aesthetics. He further describes his work as “anxious abstractions from the tension between the physical body interacting with the space it inhabits and the objects it encounters.”
De Palma was born in Lexington Kentucky and he recieved his BA from Vanderbilt University in 1970 and a BFA from the Boston School of the Museum of Fine Arts in 1972. He recieved his MFA from Tufts University, before moving to New York City in the 1980s, where he found work at Sperone Westwater Gallery and as an assistant to artist Red Grooms. His work is in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the Smithsonian Institute in Washington, D.C., and the Eli Broad Family Foundation in Los Angeles, among others.
