Ascaso Gallery is happy to announce Neonland, an exhibition of vibrant, uncooked and irreverent work by Fanny Brodar, opening February ninth. Born in Norway in 1971, Brodar grew up in New York watching Sesame Avenue and drawing on the ground of her bed room, creating imaginary associates and made-up worlds that helped her take care of traumatic occasions in the actual one.

Dreaming of turning into a youngsters’s ebook illustrator, she earned a BFA in illustration from the Artwork Institute of Boston, however within the years that adopted, her life took a unique flip, together with an extended sojourn in Montana hanging out with cowboys and climbing mountains, and he or she stopped portray for nearly twenty years. 5 years in the past, having relocated to coastal Maine, she was given a secondhand easel, and rediscovered an urge to color. In early 2020, because the pandemic closed in, she discovered an escape from the isolation and darkness by portray a sequence of vibrant canvases depicting “a euphoric tapestry, an otherworldly and magical place,” she recollects. “In some ways, I used to be reverting again to being a toddler drawing in my room.”

Impressed by the simplicity of childhood, in addition to Philip Guston’s neo-expressionist figuration and Rose Wiley’s late-blooming profession portray cartoonish takes on fashionable life, Brodar appears upon portray as a time for play and experimentation. Simply as she did when she was 8, she tends to start out out mendacity on the ground, drawing immediately on the canvas earlier than pinning it to a wall, working in scrawls of oil stick towards fields of acrylic and spray paint. In reflecting her affection for time-honored favorites like Massive Chicken, classic Mickey Mouse and Coca-Cola, and by using theories of coloration psychology, she hopes to spark a heat glow of nostalgia within the minds of viewers, reconnecting them to glad recollections of childhood from which they’ll draw power and therapeutic.

Neonland is an imaginary place harking back to her birthplace, Norway, the place she says “the huge, remoted landscapes produce probably the most superb mild, and a sky filled with stars and cosmic neon coloration.” Whereas portray this sequence, she listened to the music of Norwegian organist Iver Kleive, particularly his model of “Som den gyldne sol fremgryder,” or “Just like the Golden Solar Ascending.” In some ways autobiographical, these work additionally embrace references to her adventures within the mountains amongst the cowboys and the great desolation of wide-open western vistas, in addition to the elation she now feels whereas beekeeping and pottering in her backyard amongst the flowers.

Over the previous 12 months, Brodar has exploded onto the artwork scene, exhibiting her work in 9 solo exhibitions in New York, Paris, Spain, Taiwan, Shanghai, Hong Kong and Seoul. She lives and works in Kennebunkport, Maine.