Brett Ginsburg: Cadence

Matthew Brown is pleased to present Cadence, an exhibition of new paintings, sculpture, and experimental works on pressure-distributive film by New York-based artist Brett Ginsburg. This is Ginsburg’s first exhibition with the gallery, and his first exhibition in the United States.

Ginsburg’s practice meditates on the interstices between systems of technology and biology, and the innate sequences and patterns that ebb and flow on the extremities of our reflexive experiences. In Cadence, he explores these peripheral terrains through acts of dissection and reassembly, halving and quartering forms and visual information derived from a confluence of first-hand encounters, digital renderings, and research artifacts. His work foregrounds the tensions between fragmentation and wholeness, chaos and order, inviting viewers to engage in a dialectical relationship with the artwork.

Central to the exhibition are eight paintings, installed as two panoramas suspended on the columns of the gallery space. Ginsburg’s painting process is achieved through long-exposure monoprinting: the paintings are rendered entirely in reverse on planes of glass through dispersed brushstrokes and optically mixed color palettes. As each layer of acrylic is applied against the glass, Ginsburg builds up a membrane of paint that gets reinforced with canvas once the entire composition is complete. The surface of the resulting paintings reflect the hydrophobic nature of the paints viscous molecule and the vibratory nature of our often unseen surroundings. Both the compositions and content are spliced and interwoven into smaller rectangular sections, evoking the disorienting perspectives of microscopy or bisected structures in architectural drawings. In one panorama, a study of orb forms unfolds—drawing inspiration from György Kepes’s experimental photography—creating a visual staccato that disrupts linear perception and suggests multiple temporalities and spatialities.

The sculptures in Cadence interact with the paintings not as separate entities but as a continuation of Ginsburg’s inquiry on bisections and fragmentations, offering a counterpoint to the planar quality of the panoramas. A polyurethane cast modeled from a piston and its volumetric negative, reminiscent of a packing insert, has been split into multiple parts and stationed throughout the gallery space. The fibrous surfaces recall the felt used to buffer printing presses, emphasizing the in-betweenness of the objects themselves. These interplays between states of being and thresholds extend to the works on pressure-distributive film, a material more commonly associated with medical and technological applications. Here, the film is repurposed as a medium to investigate the nuances of compression, tension, and the tenuous boundaries between states of being.

The whole of Cadence is a meditation on call-and-response that foregrounds the intricate relationships between form, material, and perception. By using the gallery’s columns not merely as structural elements, Ginsburg recontextualizes the gallery’s physical framework to turn these vertical planes into agents of visual fragmentation and synthesis. The viewer is compelled to navigate between these structural interventions, as well as the fragmented content across the paintings, sculptures, and prints, experiencing the work as a series of shifting perspectives that challenge conventional notions of space and stability. This spatial choreography reflects Ginsburg’s interest in the relational dynamics of viewing—how movement, both of the body and the eye, constructs and deconstructs meaning.