Contemporary Art
www.charlesbragg.com

"There are expressionists and impressionist. I think I'm an aggravationist."-Charles Bragg

Whose world is more absurd, Charles Bragg's or ours? This is the question inevitably raised by the satirical visions so skillfully painted, engraved, sculpted, and drawn by this artist from the West Coast.
Charles Bragg's pictorial lampoons and sardonic pageants - directed at such power groups as the military, the church, and the professions - somehow seems the essence of rationality.

Charles Bragg was Born in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1931.
He began his career as an artist in the early fifties, but it wasn't until 1968, at a hugely successful one-man show, that the style that has made him so popular really emerged. Since then, he has achieved worldwide recognition for his satirical studies of mankind and his environment. A hard worker, Charles stays at his drawing board or easel five hours a day. "Just trying to make a buck, as van Gogh used to say," he explains.
"I just love painting and drawing and having the freedom to do what I want."

He really means that. Charles feels no compulsion to be a trendsetter or technical innovator. He feels that his work is best when it speaks directly. But doesn’t such devotion to popular image, to broadly understandable concepts, to commercial art, inhibit him from digging more deeply into his own well of possibilities? "Not at all," he replies. "Andy Warhol once said that all art is commercial. It’s just that some is bad and some is good."
Charles Bragg is a devoted student of the human race. As one of the keenest observers of contemporary times, he has etched his little figures into the American consciousness.

Charles Bragg's book ABSURD WORLD, displays fully the wit and insight of this provocative social commentator, as well as his technical virtuosity. The panorama of human frailties-greed, vanity, and hypocrisy, among others-is personified in droll, gnomelike characters, painted in rich vibrant colors or etched with a love of the turn of a line. Bragg has often been compared to Bosch, Goya, and Daumier. Like them, he is a master of the traditional graphic skills, which he uses to amuse. His sculptures of judges, sportsmen, misers, and votuptuaries, of God and Don Quixote, demonstrate the same caricatural gift in a blend of satire, irony, and art.
Charles Bragg currently resides in Hollywood Hills, California.

He has held solo exhibitions from San Francisco to Vienna, from New Orleans to Munich, and from Philadelphia to Honolulu and Long Beach. , and has been commissioned to do work for "Playboy", "Mother Jones", and the "New York Times", and has been the subject of a PBS Special documentary: "Charles Bragg - One of a Kind". He has won several national an international awards for artistic merit and his work is in the permanent collection of museums around the world including the Pushkin Museum in Moscow, Gallery of Modern Art in Milan, Joseph Hirshhorn Collection and many others. ...

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