Michael van Bree

In This Exhibition

Past Works

I was born in the suburbs outside of the city limits of Tucson, Arizona, and I never lived in places that had a lot of other kids. While I would meet people through school, during my earlier years, I was left with a lot of time by myself or with my sister, and we would discover the world through books or playing pretend, which my older sister grew out of. This solitude left me with a distant fascination for interpersonal relationships, and what really formed them, and my work often deals with that now. My work straddles the lines between fiction and reality, the body and the abject, and the mythical and the mundane. I create worlds in my work where parts of the self exist separately from the body, where realism and stylization co-exist, where something can be both ordinary as well as divine and alien.

I work mainly in processes, moving from piece to piece, and thus ends up being represented through sculpture and performance because of this workflow. I like working with materials like food which will rot, or relatively common objects that I make my own through modification. My drawings and paintings are imbued with elements of fantasy from the books I read as a child, and with the sense of strangeness that I’ve grown close to in my work here. Working with things that I find funny, or unsettling creates a sense of bittersweetness in my work, whether that develops into something humorous, something people will laugh about and move on from. On the flipside of that coin, a reaction can easily develop into disgust. The brain loves to solve puzzles, and when it finds things that are satisfactory, it has us laugh, or finding the solution unsatisfactory or unsavory has us feel disgust and repulsion. There’s fascination in all parts of my work, from the in-between stages of movement, parts of the human body on the face and the hands, and the idea that the mundane can be something more than what we make it to be, forming magic in the little rituals we make in ourselves.

In my more recent I work with tedious processes that make a structure hard to navigate, where something made with care can still make little sense to people, even the maker. Cobbling together a house of cards that is inherently non-permanent, and still hand-painting every card has a level of contradiction that I feel drawn to. There’s a level of irreverence, and belated childhood rebellion in my work, from the titles and the concepts to the actual execution. My art asks questions about how we interact with others, from the person you hold dear to the stranger on the street, and how we make relationships with our past and present selves.