EXPO Chicago

April 2023

Booth 278

Featuring Moll Brau

Martha’s is thrilled to present seven new works on canvas and paper by Austin-based multidisciplinary artist Moll Brau. Each painting and drawing exists within Brau’s larger system of interrogations into identity performance and the feminine grotesque, linked together by the artist’s body as an ephemeral tool rife with possibility for disrupting the categories which limit us. In these new works, the artist takes on portraiture as a physically and spiritually demanding exercise to investigate how the care we take in our relationships can both create and destroy worlds.

With jewel-toned oil and acrylic impasto that crawls with organic girth over the artist-subject and canvas edge alike, each of the paintings in this new series by Moll Brau explores one of the several variants for the concept of “Love” as explicated by ancient Greek philosophy. While missing here is the most widely-used definition of “Love”–that sexualized, maddening, and romantic love wielded by Venus's son Cupid or "Eros", from which we borrow the contemporary English definition--these five scenes illustrate loves less discussed: experiences of caring for self, soul, and surrounding which may be messy but which offer transformative potential equivalent to their more popular counterpart.

The paintings fuse techniques, textures, materials, and palettes with weapon-like resourcefulness in a battle for the potency of honest ambivalence–ambivalence not in the unfeeling, but in the holding of two different truths simultaneously. The viewer tags along as Brau embarks on a kind of hero's journey through the landscapes of love’s prismatic challenges. In Pragma (When We Were Trees), a welcoming path dotted with candy leaves and swaddled in gems of light leads just outside our comfortable definitions of partner and family love. "Pragma," the root for "pragmatic," speaks to the solidity of the material world, referring to the philosophical notion that virtuous care begins with the space and time we occupy; relating in this way, one might grow alongside another like trees or like the tree's branches, and compromises must often be made to maintain harmony.

Further into the forest, we reach the dark belly of Agape (Roux), whose namesake speaks to both the reciprocal love between human and divine, as well as the alchemical breakdown necessary when cooking the most delectable sauces. Much like a roux, the Greek “agapao” was believed to be a love which seeks an obliteration of separation: although our subject’s face is smothered in the fungal alchemy of moonlit mud, she still cultivates magic in her ever-lifted palm. In a deviation from Greek philosophy, Brau presents the ultimate love as Philuatia (Spitfire): with femme muscles gleaming against the flaming imaginary of crumbling goddesses, it is ultimately “self-love” from which we end our journey and begin our history anew.

Moll Brau handles the inscrutable with the frenetic integrity necessary to communicate the strangeness of embodiment, presenting an avatar of postmodern womanhood (note the artist’s blonde bob and non-descript undergarment motifs throughout) through the virtual Imaginarium of the portrait. The fable-like composition of the artist’s series of drawings might belie their sobriety if not for harried pastel streaks reckless of demarcated boundaries, suggesting thunderous anxious movement in moments of great stillness reminiscent of Bacon. Though brimming with fantastical symbols like magic mirrors and floating swords, these are neither from fairy tale nor Tarot deck, as evidenced through Brau’s hand powerfully gnawing away with pastel nubs any expectations of precision.

Born in Shreveport, Louisiana, Moll Brau graduated with a BFA from Louisiana State University before relocating to Austin, Texas. Brau works across several disciplines with a special interest in feminine identity, the body, and how objects and events relate to and redefine our understanding of these concepts. Moll's paintings grapple with her interior struggles metabolizing systems of oppression–specifically, gender normativity and conventions of femininity–celebrating experiences like cultivating her physical strength in an unabashed attempt at self-mastery. Brau has exhibited in group shows at Inman Gallery in Houston, Texas, and Stiltsville with Half Gallery during Miami Art Week, in addition to a solo show of works at Martha’s in Austin and an upcoming solo exhibition at Ruscha & Co. Moll Brau lives and works in Austin, Texas.

Text by Lindsey Lascaux

Photos by Andrea Calo