Franchised Landscape #4, 1997
"It's ok to hint or suggest at political content or intention, but you can't overdo it, or try to ram it down the viewers throat: I think you want to strive for subtlety. Photographs are open to multiple meanings and you have to allow enough space for that multi-dimensionality to have room to breathe, that's true."
Born in San Francisco, California in 1955, Brouws is a self-taught photographer. In his artist's statement, Brouws writes that he "has combined anthropological inquiry and a bleak aesthetic beauty mining the overlooked, the obsolete, the mundane." Brouws currently lives in upstate New York with his wife, Wendy Burton, who is also a Robert Klein Gallery photographer.
Selected Collections:
J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, CA
San Francisco Museum of Art, CA
Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CA
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City
Harvard's Fogg Museum, Cambridge, MA
Princeton University Art Museum, Princeton, NJ
Monographs:
Approaching Nowhere, 2006
Readymades: American Roadside Artifacts, 2003
Inside the Life Reptile Tent: The Twilight World of the Carnival Midway, 2001
Highway: America's Endless Dream, 1997
Twenty-six Abandoned Gasoline Stations, 1992