Brett Reichman is an American painter and professor at the San Francisco Art Institute. Born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, he has lived and worked in San Francisco since 1984. His work came to fruition in the late 1980s out of cultural activism that addressed the AIDS epidemic and gay identity politics and was curated into early exhibitions that acknowledged those formative issues. These exhibitions included:
Situation: Perspectives on Work by Lesbian and Gay Artists at New Langton Arts in San Francisco,
The Anti-Masculine at the Kim Light Gallery in Los Angeles,
In A Different Light: Visual Culture, Sexual Identity, Queer Practice at the Berkeley Art Museum, Berkeley, California.
Reichman approached these themes subtly after a legislation passed in 1989 restricting federal funding for art dealing with homosexuality and AIDS. His And the Spell Was Broken Somewhere Over the Rainbow references Oz while indirectly addressing that San Francisco could no longer be viewed as a land of enchantment due to the AIDS crisis.
Style and theme
Reichman's inquiry into the politics of gay culture critiques political correctness and cultural assimilation. He separates the concept of realism from naturalism within a discourse that views popular culture as anxious, obsessed with artificiality and unnatural beauty. His pictures take lubricious fantasy to the point of ridicule, without losing completely a quotient of psychological truth.
Often, Reichman's works, such as Gildcraft Italia Mondrian Vase, include what he collects: mid-century modern furniture and dinnerware. The aesthetics of these mid-century items are often present in his representations of non-normative contemporary gay domestic space. The works in his show Better Living Through Design at the CB1 Gallery are titled after his mid-century furniture and set pieces.
Reichman's gay identity in the age of AIDS drew him to expose social prejudices while expressing his sense of self. The AIDS era drew his consciousness to loss—the loss of life as well as of innocence and the sense of freedom that once prevailed in the gay community. Reichman's 1998 show, It's Hard to Be Happy, displayed at the Orange County Museum of Art, reveals his fascination with duality and misleading appearances. In Threefold, Reichman depicts three elves to describe the awareness and threat of AIDS.
Technique
Reichman's early works use children's toys (such as rubber lambs and pixies) and childhood fables while focusing on a certain loss of cultural innocence.
Reichman draws attention to how posh clothing and other drapery in pre-modern European paintings can communicate the indescribable and unimaginable to viewers. He uses watercolor and gouach with layered crosshatching, which simultaneously builds up and negates his works.
Exhibitions
Reichman has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions at:
His work is featured in the publications Art—A Sex Book by John Waters and Bruce Hainley, Untitled Publication (Red Square), by Feature Inc, Pacific Light: A Survey of California Watercolor 1908-2008, the Nordiska Akvarellmuseet and In A Different Light: Visual Culture, Sexual Identity, Queer Practice, Art, AIDS, America, among others.
Awards and grants
2012 San Francisco Art Institute, Morgan Library, New York, New York, Faculty Development Grant
2005 San Francisco Art Institute, Faculty Development Grant
2001 San Francisco Art Institute, Faculty Development Grant