Sharon Brant
by Matthew Deleget

The following text was published in the exhibition catalogue Sharon Brant: Change and Recurrence on the occasion of the artist’s solo exhibition at MINUS SPACE, Brooklyn, NY, from January 6 - March 23, 2024. 

I first met Sharon Brant about twenty years ago, but I feel like I’ve known her my entire lifetime. I can’t recall precisely how we crossed paths, but my visual awareness is all the better for it. For two decades I’ve followed her life, work, and ideas with great interest. I’ve spent countless hours with her in her studio, both her former one in Jersey City, as well as her current one up in Beacon. We’ve discussed everything about everything, exhaustively: her biography and experiences, her aesthetic concerns and challenges, all in minute detail.

During visits to her studio, I regularly assail her with questions. But more often now we simply stand side-by-side and just look at her work without speaking, often smiling, nodding our heads every now and again. We are past words at this point.

Her work is also present in my home in South Orange. It’s an essential element of where my family and I live our lives. And I’ve looked at her work every day for ages now. Day in and day out, in and out of weeks, year-round, always.

After all this time, I’ve come to realize one thing. Sharon’s work reigns over me. And I now understand why. I can never anticipate where her practice will go or what her next move will be in the studio. But I’m never really concerned about it. In her case, I always trust the chef. 

In her practice, Sharon never elects to take the easy route. She never accepts the obvious choice. Sharon never makes Sharon Brants. After more than five decades of laboring in the studio, she is far from drifting into complacency. With each new successive body of work, she ups the ante. She is continually learning, honing her scalpel-sharp sensibilities, and probing her select materials for opportunities.

Painters often paint themselves into a corner, but Sharon is an exception. She confronts the corner head-on and razes the entire room. Her practice knows no walls, no floor, no ceiling. It is boundless. In her studio she can see the curvature of the Earth. In her materials she sees the potential for infinity.

An optimist at heart, Sharon asks a profoundly simple question. What if? And her work is that relentless investigation laid bare, where inquiry always trumps result. The word conclusion is just not part of her lexicon.

I admire many things about Sharon’s work, but what I admire most though is how her work commands – no – demands your attention. And yet it does so, paradoxically, with the least amount of visual information possible, never more than just two or three elements. Her work possesses a rare clarity, yet remains ineffable and enduring.

I’m honored to present Sharon’s new exhibition Change and Recurrence here at the gallery, in which she continues to mine, question, challenge, and further her enduring investigation into the reductive elements of color, shape, and line, and their inexhaustible arrangement on a two-dimensional surface.

Her recent paintings concisely present two primary visual elements: a dominant, smoothly-painted field of a single color (pink, blue, orange, or black, for example) which is topped by a dynamic, often impastoed set of concentric lines in contrasting colors that resemble the shape of hovering energy. Her works pair passive and active, gestural and reductive, vibrant and subdued, dominant and recessive, and textured and flat elements in animated opposition.

In Sharon’s recent work, I see an inquisitive, contemplative mind. That much is evident. But I also see a profound awareness and acceptance of her aesthetic predilections, as well as an exhaustive understanding of materials and a masterful resourcefulness with each. And finally I see an uncompromising editor of her own practice, which is the rarest of qualities among artists. To me all of these traits are virtuous and are the underpinning of her past and current work, not to mention her work yet to come.