Kadar Brock

Kadar Brock is a Brooklyn-based artist known for his paintings at the intersection between abstract and figurative, the result of a meticulous process of layering, erasing, scratching, and reworking. Much like medieval palimpsests, his canvases are evolving surfaces, whose materiality is continually altered and reshaped. Brock likes to work on several paintings simultaneously, applying a layer to one canvas before moving on to the next, allowing each piece to develop gradually through repeated intervention. In this approach, at once methodical and frenetic, chance and time play major roles. The repeated process never yields to the same outcome: each work is shaped by unpredictability, yet it is imbued with a unique way of working with colour and treating the canvas which is distinctive of Brock’s style.

Brock was born in New York in 1980 and graduated in 2002 from the BFA Cooper Union School of Art in New York. In 2019, he was invited to participate in the artist’s residencies at the Macedonia institute, in Chatham, NY, and at Palazzo Monti in Brescia, Italy. He has also took part in the 2021 edition of the artists residency at the Center Cultural Andratx in Mallorca, Spain. and in the 2020 Hayama Artist Residency Exhibition in Tokyo.  Brook has featured in several group group exhibitions in the US and abroad, including Stuff: international contemporary art from the collection of Burt Aaron at Detroit MOCA in 2007, The Cursed Chateau and Informal Relations at the Indianapolis Museum of Contemporary Art in 2009 and 2010, respectively. His work was included in the 2024 Hayama Artist Residency Exhibition at Koki Arts in Tokyo, Japan. More recently, Brook featured in the group exhibition In With The Old – P.A.D. Retrospective, held in 2021 at the Walter Elwood Museum of the Mohawk Valley in Amsterdam, NY. He currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.