John Brooks has a painting and drawing included in Fragile Figures: Being and Time, a group exhibition curated by Alice Gray Stites at the 21C Museum Hotel in Cincinnati.
Brooks pays homage to the intersection of memory and desire in narrative portraits inspired by the people, places, and works of art that sustain him and his practice. Titled after a song by gay musician Rostam Batmanglij, Bike Dream, the artist explains, “is part of a body of work begun in 2021 entitled We All Come and Go Unknown in which I combined images from various sources — film, literature, art history, my own personal life – to create new, complex, compositions that both hint at narratives but feel ultimately unknowable and just out of reach.
John Brooks in Fragile Figures: Beings and Time
On View: September 1, 2025 - August 2026
21c Museum Hotel
Cincinnati, OH
