DEBORAH BROWN: Traces

Main Projects is proud to present our inaugural exhibition, Traces, of acclaimed American painter Deborah Brown. A fifth-generation Californian and a New York resident for over four decades, Brown has been a vital force in the contemporary art world with solo shows spanning the Americas, Europe and Asia. Her kaleidoscopic, psychologically charged paintings offer a compelling meditation on urban life, memory, and the emotional dynamic of the everyday.

Traces brings together Brown’s most recent bodies of work, forming a narrative arc that explores the vestiges of memory and the ontology of objects. Empty houses hum with the echoes of lives lived. Classical statuary radiates timeless narrative and enduring myth. Still-lifes composed of household curiosities merge the intimacy of memento mori with the uncanniness of the kunstkammer. Brown’s paintings depict spaces where history and presence coexist, reminding us that our psychic world is intimately bound to the material one—that objects, though silent, contain and disclose our interior existence.

Traces, both literal and metaphorical, are foundational to Brown’s practice. Her canvases are permeated with echoes of place, presence, and absence. Through a dynamic, gestural style and a richly expressive palette, Brown has developed a singular visual language. Her brushwork, confident and fluid, captures fleeting moments of transcendence, rendering the static world alive with movement and meaning. In her hands, landscape, still life, and figuration merge seamlessly into a luminous tableau, preserving the evanescent with ecstatic intensity.

At the heart of the exhibition are two major series created over the past five years—Shadow Paintings and Haunted Houses—both born from Brown’s deep engagement with the city during the isolation of the COVID-19 pandemic. Drawing inspiration from daily walks through East Williamsburg and beyond, Brown transforms overlooked city corners into emotionally resonant portraits of life in flux. Accompanied by her loyal dog Trout, Brown wandered the city’s quiet streets, capturing elongated shadows and reimagining herself as a 21st-century flâneuse. These shadowy self-portraits, always in tandem with her canine companion, meditate on solitude, continuity, and the human need for connection.

The exhibition also features still lifes that blur the boundary between the domestic and the autobiographical. Objects drawn from Brown’s home—family heirlooms, verdant plants, anatomical models—are rendered with the same expressive focus as her urban scenes. These intimate assemblages function as interior landscapes, conjuring presences that hover just beyond the canvas’s edge.

Rendered in vivid hues and loaded with energy, Brown’s work reveals the hidden rhythms of a world more often seen than truly felt. Whether depicting Brooklyn row houses, Pasadena mansions, or serene garden glades punctuated by archaic statuary, her paintings offer an intimate encounter with the sublime contained within the everyday. Her approach—anchored in figuration yet open to abstraction—imbues each scene with a sense of immediacy and wonder, the result of decades of disciplined exploration.

With Traces, Main Projects presents Deborah Brown at her most vivid and poetic. She invites viewers to rediscover the physical world—not as a backdrop to passing moments, but as a dynamic, living presence, animated by light, shadow, memory, and meaning.