Brian Calvin

Brian Calvin (b. 1969, Visalia, California) is an American painter known for stylised, close-up portraits that blend figuration and abstraction, drawing on the vocabularies of Surrealism, Pop art, Cubism and Funk art.

Calvin earned a BA from the University of California, Berkeley in 1991 and an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1994. He lives and works between Ojai and Los Angeles. His paintings feature flattened planes of saturated, luminous colour, often depicting female or androgynous subjects in extreme close-up — faces merge, skin tones shift and eyes or limbs blend ambiguously, opening conceptual depth beneath bold, sunny hues. Alongside these portraits he paints California-inspired landscapes and interiors.

He has held solo exhibitions at Almine Rech, Anton Kern Gallery, ACME and Marc Foxx (Los Angeles), Corvi-Mora (London) and Cabinet (Milan). Group shows include the Centre Pompidou (Paris), the Museum of Contemporary Art (Los Angeles and Lyon) and the Orange County Museum of Art. His work is held in the collections of LACMA, DePaul Art Museum, Portland Museum of Art and the Aïshti Foundation in Beirut.