Estate of Roger Brown
GRAY is pleased to present Roger Brown: Weathervane, the gallery’s first monographic exhibition dedicated to Brown since announcing exclusive representation of the artist’s estate. Opening at GRAY Chicago on March 19, Weathervane explores the artist’s vision of an emotionally charged contemporary life set at the tense border between the built environment and the natural world.
Featuring eleven paintings from the 1980s and 1990s, the exhibition reflects Brown’s clarity of vision as an artist both unafraid to face sociopolitical headwinds and unable to ignore ecological destruction. Playing with shifts of scale, Brown communicates reverence and awe for the power of nature while his perspective on human plight sees a fraught and tenuous future. For example, in the 1980 painting Lake Effect, Brown paints the grand high-rises of Chicago, one of the world’s most famous skylines at the time, as a minuscule strip of skyline against alarming concentric arcs of red storm clouds.
In rhythmic aerial compositions such as Weather Map and Crosswinds, humans with their monotonous houses and stretches of highways are diminutive characters beholden to far more vast meteorological systems. Beyond his visions of cityscapes and sprawling suburbia, his focus on clouds in natural wanderings like those in Couple Progressing Towards Mount Rincon continues as a means to contrast scale. In other canvases such as The Flight of Daedalus and Icarus, his study for a commissioned mural on the façade of 120 North La Salle Street in Chicago, Brown looks to mythic figures for a more individual parable of sky-high human aspirations meeting fateful realities.
As with much of Brown’s oeuvre, the mesmerizing scenes and archetypal characters scattered among them return to a sense of autobiography, nowhere more elegiacally so than in his 1997 Burned Hills, completed in the months leading up to his death after a decade of battling AIDS. Created across a career spent making meteorological observations into allegorical manifestos on shifting winds, Brown’s paintings in Weathervane convey a world teetering on the precipice of pleasure and peril.
The exhibition opens at GRAY Chicago with a public reception from 5-7 PM on March 19, 2026, and remains on view through June 13, 2026. Roger Brown: Weathervane will travel to GRAY New York on Madison Avenue, opening on July 8, 2026.
ABOUT ROGER BROWN
Roger Brown (1941-1997) was a pioneering artist and leading figure in the Chicago Imagists group whose vibrant and provocative works mine the depths of contemporary American life, popular culture, and art history with a biting sense of humor. Born in rural Alabama to a religious family who encouraged his art at an early age, Brown briefly considered becoming a minister before dedicating himself fully to art. He moved to Chicago and enrolled in the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, from which he received his BFA in 1968 and his MFA in 1970.
While studying at SAIC, he was exposed to and struck by a diverse range of art movements and styles, including Proto-Renaissance Italian art, Modernist architecture, Surrealism, American Regionalism, various indigenous art traditions, folk arts, and self-taught artists like Joseph Yoakum. Brown’s SAIC instructors, Ray Yoshida and Whitney Halstead, and his cohort of fellow Chicago Imagists were also incredibly influential as he began to shape his singular aesthetic. Unfolding across painting, drawing, theater set design, sculpture, and object collection throughout the following three decades of his career, Brown’s practice explored recurring themes such as urban and suburban isolation, social alienation, weather patterns and natural disasters, humanity versus nature, and global politics, all while always maintaining a signature wry sense of humor.
Deeply attentive to the contradictions and absurdities of American life and in particular as viewed from his perspective as a queer man from the South, Brown fearlessly reshaped the boundaries of visual culture and worked fastidiously until his death from AIDS complications at the age of 55.
Brown’s work has been the subject of monographic exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Illinois, Museum of Arts and Design, New York, Hirshhorn Museum & Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC, and the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh, United Kingdom. Additionally, he has been featured in group shows at Fondazione Prada, Milan, Italy, Museo Reina Sofía, Madrid Spain, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, Art Institute of Chicago, Illinois, MoMA PS1, New York, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, among others.
His work is held in numerous institutional collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Museum of Modern Art, and Whitney Museum of American Art in New York; Art Institute of Chicago and Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, Illinois; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, California; Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam, Netherlands; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Massachusetts; National Gallery of Art and The National Portrait Gallery, Washington, DC; Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam, Netherlands; Scottish National Gallery of Art, Edinburgh, United Kingdom; and the Museum Moderner Kunst, Vienna, Austria, amongst others.
