The Mayor's Office Gallery

PRIMORDIAL SOUP

Solo show by David Lloyd Brown

The Boston City Hall Galleries are pleased to present Primordial Soup, a solo exhibition by Boston-based artist David Lloyd Brown. Brown's paintings explore the interplay of order and change through a unique process of creating and combining template shapes. These abstract compositions, rooted in diverse cultural influences, resonate powerfully with the building's distinctive brutalist architecture. 

This exhibition presents a series of large canvases that create immersive pictorial spaces, designed to envelop the viewer in a world of color and shape. The primordial soup theory posits that, through a process of transformation, a mass of inchoate organic material evolved over centuries into living organisms. As time progressed, the building blocks of one form of life were themselves transformed into new forms, such as the fins of fish providing the genetic basis for the legs of amphibians.

David Lloyd Brown employs templates as if they were genetic building blocks, creating paintings using oil and acrylic, and drawings with charcoal and ebony pencils. These templates become compositional tools, allowing him to express the idea that continuous change is inevitable, yet can coexist with order. From a stock of approximately a dozen template shapes, derived from diverse visual and cultural sources (including his earlier paintings), he discovers new template shapes by combining parts of existing ones, using these hybrids to create new compositions.

“I am inspired by images, symbols, and patterns that appear to be long lasting, almost timeless in many cultures. In William Morris designs, the French Curve, the Boteh motif in Persian carpets, the paisley in Scotland, and in Mayan stone carvings, one sees a similar motif permeating those cultures and their artwork. Making these paintings in our current climate of environmental change has given me a sense of urgency and responsibility. We all share a global ecosystem under threat everywhere. With every painting I finish, I sense the world that inspired it is slipping away. Will these paintings become an artifact of our time, when we knew we were destroying the world around us but could not stop our own destruction?”

To learn more about the artist or inquiries please visit davidlloydbrown.com