Michael Werner Gallery, Beverly Hills is pleased to present Paradise Valley, an exhibition of new paintings and works on paper by the painter Brett Goodroad (b. 1979 in Kearney, Nebraska). This exhibition marks the artist’s first solo exhibition in Los Angeles and his first with Michael Werner Gallery.

Known for painting en plein air, nature and the environment influence Goodroad’s work. While painting outdoors has a strong connection to the history of art, starting with the French Impressionists, working from rural areas allows Goodroad to create a pictorial language outside of the artistic canon. The artist says that he is “no longer living in rooms where these influences have control over him.” In Paradise Valley, Goodroad titles paintings after titans Nicolas Poussin and Jean-Michel Basquiat, but correlations with their work only became apparent to Goodroad after he completed his paintings.

Goodroad works between the push and pull of abstraction and figuration, legibility and obscurity, lucidity and dissonance. In this way, his paintings manipulate and expand formal structures, like what happens in music or poetry. Many of the works were painted in Surprise Valley, California, where the artist lives and works. However, for this exhibition, a few of the smaller paintings on copper traveled with Goodroad to Iceland and Spain, where their colors and compositions were shaped by the air, wind, and weather of these remote locations.