Beauty is a Rare Thing, Brian Alfred’s sixth solo exhibition with Miles McEnery Gallery, brings together two distinct bodies of work by the artist. For the first series, Alfred documented his recent travels from Osaka to Brooklyn, and the Dominican Republic to the West Village. Snapshots of personal moments shape an exhibition of serene vignettes. 

The accompanying suite of paintings, installed in an adjacent gallery space, is comprised of nine portraits of contemporary musicians. Spanning genres from electronic to folk, the paintings celebrate the power of music in shaping the world around us, as well as the artist himself.

Alfred’s process, honed over the past two decades, distills his source imagery to its most essential forms, layering idyllic elements together and segmenting forms into two dimensional planes of mostly-solid color to reveal a sense of stillness that can be tranquil, unsettling, or both. His compositions are reminiscent of architectural ukiyo-e prints, both in technique and style, while his exploration of collage continues to inform the resulting paintings.

“Alfred captures the ephemeral, silencing the noise of the world and focusing solely on the composition,” writes Annabel Keenan. “In every image, there is a sense that he is not only preserving the memory of a place, but also the essence of a specific time. This show… is more personal than his others.” Beauty is a Rare Thing casts a newfound appreciation on the everyday, presenting an aura of hope over our ever changing world.

BRIAN ALFRED (b. 1974 in Pittsburgh, PA) received his Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in 1997 from Pennsylvania State University and his Master of Fine Arts degree in 1999 from Yale University. He has been the subject of recent solo exhibitions at Miles McEnery Gallery, New York, NY; Maho Kubota Gallery, Tokyo, Japan; Hezi Cohen Gallery, Tel Aviv, Israel; Salon 94 Video Wall, New York, NY; and the Frist Center for Visual Art, Nashville, TN. In the summer of 2024, a retrospective of his work will be exhibited by the Williamsburg Biannual.

His work has been included in group exhibitions at numerous international institutions such as the American Academy of Arts and Letters, New York, NY; Aomori Museum of Art, Japan; Den Frie Centre of Contemporary Art, Copenhagen, Denmark; Denver Art Museum, CO; and the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Australia.

Alfred’s work may be found in the collections of the Buffalo AKG Museum, NY; Denver Art Museum, CO; National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Australia; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, CA; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY, among others.

Alfred is the host of SOUND & VISION, a podcast of conversations with artists and musicians about the creative process. Guests have included Diana Al-Hadid, Jules de Balincourt, Inka Essenhigh, Dominique Fung, Kahlil Robert Irving, Byron Kim, Hein Koh, Tony Matelli, Hilary Pecis, James Siena, Alexandria Smith, and Chloe Wise.

The artist lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.