Brian Novatny beautifully employs a sophisticated technique of light-touch and seeming tentativeness to what are ultimately perfectly composed and engaging pictures. The vulnerable quality of the artist’s mark echoes the confused, preoccupied, or uncertain sense of the figures. In the same way that the people are disconnected from one another in their environs, they are frequently similarly disjointed themselves, as their bodies and heads may be alternately painted and drawn in contrast to one another, or the scale of two people in the same space disproportionate. Yet, amid all this uncertainty, Novatny’s broken stories manage to engage and delight. Novatny’s drawings are colorful, intimate works that are disconcerting and oddly charming.

Brian Novatny has exhibited across the U.S. in museums and art centers including the Mississippi Museum of Art (Jacksonville, MS), the Columbus Museum of Art (Columbus, OH), the Layton Gallery of the Milwaukee Institute of Art & Design (Milwaukee, WS), and the Center on Contemporary Art (Seattle, WA). He has had solo exhibitions in New York City, New Orleans, Philiadelphia, Seattle, St Louis and Santa Monica. In Germany, Novatny has exhibited at Kunstverein Speyer- Kulturhof Flachgasse, Speyer, and is represented by galleries in Berlin and Frankfurt. His work has been broadly reviewed including reviews in Art in America and Art & Antiques.