Nüart Gallery is pleased to present Material Memory, a two-person exhibition featuring new works by Julian Brown and Randall Reid. The exhibition explores how memory, history, and transformation become embedded within surface, texture, and material.

Brown’s large-scale paintings and works on paper draw from Polish folk art, personal memory, and inherited visual traditions. Influenced by tactile forms, handmade traditions, and fragments of childhood memory, Brown uses abstraction to create atmospheric compositions rich in color, movement, and texture. Monoprinted forms, woven patterns, and recurring motifs emerge through layered surfaces, balancing playfulness and nostalgia while connecting personal experience with cultural history. Embedded within the work is a sense of wonder and rediscovery — an exploration of heritage through environment, color, form, and harmony, elements that feel deeply rooted within the psyche.

Known for transforming reclaimed and repurposed materials into layered abstract compositions, Reid’s practice examines surface, structure, and the passage of time. Working with salvaged wood, steel, industrial fragments, and weathered materials gathered from different eras, he constructs compositions that carry visible traces of use, erosion, and transformation. His new works draw from divided landscapes, shifting terrain, architectural remnants, and processes of decay and reconstruction, balancing geometric order with organic deterioration. Through careful recontextualization, materials once tied to functional histories are granted a renewed spatial and emotional presence, existing simultaneously as formal abstractions and repositories of memory. Reid’s surfaces possess a tactile density that evokes both excavation and repair, where layers of texture and patina suggest the accumulation of time itself, reflecting on impermanence, renewal, and the imprint of human experience within material.

Together, Brown and Reid approach material not only as a physical medium, but as a carrier of accumulated experience.