Brian Cirmo
Bio
Brian Cirmo (b. 1977, Utica, NY) received his MFA in Painting and Drawing from the University at Albany, and his work has been exhibited in Chelsea NYC, Boston, Sonoma, New Orleans, and Washington DC. His residencies include the Elizabeth Murray Artist Residency, Granville, NY; and Salem Art Works Residency, Salem, NY. Cirmo lives and works in Albany, NY, and is Assistant Professor of Painting and Drawing at SUNY Onondaga, Syracuse, NY.
His last exhibition saw a run on his paintings by collectors from three continents.
Statement
I have spent the past two decades traveling throughout the country visiting museums, large cities, small towns, national parks, civil war battlefields, assassination sites, graveyards, and national monuments. I am a lifelong student of the vast profundity of American music as well as a glutton for American history, literature, western painting, film, comic strips, and cartoons; all of which have consumed my nights and days. These interests and practices are harvested and used within my process to create an intertextuality in the paintings. Using western painting, literature, popular culture, personal memories, and personal aesthetic as sources, I’m focused on building a series of paintings that encapsulate characteristics of the human condition, such as life and death, love and loss, evolution and creationism, comedy and tragedy, fame and anonymity, conflict and harmony, morality and immorality.
