June 13 – July 18, 2026
Opening reception: June 13, 2:00 pm to 5:00 pm
Gerard Brane, Limerence, 2025, 22 × 18 inches (framed)
We are pleased to present Gerard Brane: The Absence of Direction, a small if highly focused exhibition of new and recent artworks by this veteran Los Angeles artist. This show is presented with Vincent Ramos: Notice of Demolition or The Horror Vacui Haunts the House Band for the Haunted House. Both exhibitions open on Saturday, June 13 with an artists’ reception from 2 - 5 pm and continue through July 18 at as-is.
Each of Brane’s five modestly scaled (typically 22 x 18 inches) artworks centers a semi- abstract / semi-representational image which remains somewhat vague if always richly suggestive. Each of these is then set into its own thickly painted “frame”—the frame itself often much more densely and elaborately rendered than the painting it ostensibly frames—and each is “illuminated” by one or more decorative light fixtures fed by an electrical cord dangling down to the plug below, this functional element thus completing the comic ensemble. But while Brane’s artworks present as casually conceived, indifferently executed and readily accessible to a non-specialist audience, the cheerfully populist guise they affect just barely conceals a set of elite ambitions and exquisitely aesthetic judgements that argue just the opposite—the thought-provoking conflict between mass and elite taste the artist stages here being wholly intentional and forever unresolved.