BRIAN BELOTT, US

Biography photo by Chris Sanders

Brian Belott (born 1973 in East Orange, New Jersey) lives and works in New York City. 

He has exhibited internationally with shows in galleries including Morán Morán (Los Angeles), Studio d'arte Raffaelli (Trento), Loyal Gallery (Stockholm), Tanya Leighton (Berlin), Gavin Brown's Enterprise (New York), CANADA Gallery (New York) ). Belott has been included in the 2019 Whitney Biennial. 

Belott's works are exhibited in institutions including the Museum of Modern Art (New York), the Whitney Museum of American Art (New York), COBRA Museum (Amstelveen), Yuz Museum (Shanghai), The Jewish Museum (New York), MoCAD ( Detroit), The Aldrich Museum (Ridgefield), and Musée d'Art Moderne (Saint-Etienne). 

Brian Belott's work is part of the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art (New York) and the Whitney Museum of American Art (New York). 

Combination, reconfiguration, confusion: each of these features plays a vital role, because Belott is a great assembler of things. ("Everything revolves around fusion," he noted in 2017). 

Fans and cotton balls; collections of children's books; calculators bejeweled with stones; cats with clocks for eyes: Belott's is a Dadaist intent on making ordinary things extraordinary, thus creating a new kind of (entirely illogical) logic.

"Tear it up, start over, see what you have " : a policy of endless revision that seems strangely familiar as people pass through life.
"The inevitability of destruction creates more creativity," says Belott, and there is definitely a destructive, punk quality to this process of cut, paste and paint all over the place: a playful disregard for the intended uses of objects.