Kadar Brock


Kadar Brock is a casualist artist. He graduated in 2002 with a BFA from Cooper Union School of Art in New York City. He lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.
Pictures of Brock’s work were shown in W Magazine. The New York Times wrote a short piece about a show he was in. A picture of his arts was used as an example by Bloomberg News. ArtForum wrote a brief piece about his work. Cultured Magazine and Interview Magazine wrote about him.

Reviews and reception

Brock first creates relatively conventional large abstract paintings, which one commentator describes as "happy". These are then "negated and disenchanted" by a long process including adding layers, scraping, puncturing, and slicing. The results of this process are what Brock exhibits. He also incorporates fragments of such canvasses into the surfaces of other works.
W Magazine wrote that Brock was "... best known for his unorthodox approach to abstract painting, in which he creates frenetic, gestural images and then renders them unrecognizable with the help of a razor blade and a power sander."
Marina Cashdan wrote: "His studio is an ecosystem—and an efficient one—in which the artist’s methodical and ritualistic process makes for a consistent upcycling of materials across the space: when he spray-paints, he uses a canvas as the drop cloth; that canvas becomes the start of a painting; and that painting has two fates: one sliding door is going under the razor and the industrial sander, before being coated with layers of pigments and primed, sanded, and primed, a process repeated until the desired effect is reached; the other fate is to be martyred into chips or dust."
Stephan Cox, in Hunted Projects: In Dialogue wrote: "What’s fascinating is that Brock’s works are the product of an artist who aims to demystify the gesture in painting through creating rituals that in effect eradicate the didactic artist-viewer scenario. Brock doesn’t aim to create works that are easily read as being a by-product of an artist’s expression; Brock has created a set of rituals, a rolling of dice, where he, in effect has his actions directed for him. This could be through the number of brush strokes to apply or the number of cuts to make, in all, his intuitive approach to painting is not present or discernible to the viewer."