John Brooks (USA, b. 1978) is an artist, poet, curator and writer based in Los Angeles. Brooks’ expressionistic paintings often depict his friends, as well as figures and sites sourced from historic and found photographs. He combines images “to create what I think of as the hint of a new narrative.” He describes a recent suite of portraits and tableaux, some with a circus or theatrical setting, as being “charged with a sense of longing, remote desire, empathy, as well as a kind of existential openness.”
A solo exhibition of large format drawings, Islands Are Not Forever, will be on view this winter in Cincinnati, at The Alice F. and Harris K. Weston Art Gallery. His solo exhibition, if the Lovers are Losers, was at the North Carolina Museum of Art in Winston-Salem (2024); Paintings and drawings are in the permanent collection of the Speed Art Museum, Louisville, KY; Grinnell College Museum of Art, Iowa; The Green Family Art Foundation, Dallas, TX; and The Bunker Artspace, West Palm Beach, FL.