New Artist Spotlight: Brian Rochefort at Sean Kelly Gallery
Portrait of Brian Rochefort. Photo by Dustin Aksland. Courtesy of Sean Kelly Gallery.
“New Artist Spotlight” is a recurring editorial series featuring artists who have recently joined the rosters of Artsy’s gallery partners.
Brian Rochefort’s mixed-media sculptures are transportive, evoking otherworldly landscapes and extraterrestrial forms. The Los Angeles–based artist creates his polychrome works by employing stoneware, earthenware, and glasswork techniques, embracing a long-standing obsession with the raw forms and unpredictability of natural phenomena. The results are whimsical, splashy globs and vessels layered with rainbow-colored drips and daubs.
Rochefort has just joined the roster at Sean Kelly Gallery, which will mount a solo exhibition for the artist in Los Angeles this September. Born in Lincoln, Rhode Island, in 1985, Rochefort earned his BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2007. Since then, he has consistently pushed the boundaries of sculpture and ceramics through a materially inventive process that embraces elements of chance. “We have been admirers of Brian’s work for some time and jumped at the opportunity to work with him,” said Thomas Kelly, director at Sean Kelly.
To make his vibrant, knobbly sculptures, Rochefort layers unfired clay and glass. Between airbrushing layers of color and applying colorful glazes, he fires the pieces multiple times, building up their surfaces through a process that introduces cracks and peeling to enhance their texture.
Brian Rochefort, Warm Crater, 2023. Photo by Marten Elder. Courtesy of Sean Kelly Gallery.
Brian Rochefort, Coal Stack, 2023. Photo by Marten Elder. Courtesy of Sean Kelly Gallery.
Rochefort’s sundry style and techniques underpin the thematic core of his work: the volatility of nature. One recent sculpture, Coal Stack (2023), resembles a volcanic eruption with multicolored material spilling from its sides. Rochefort’s organic forms are inspired, in part, by his extensive travels to remote and lush ecosystems, such as the Amazon rainforest, the Galápagos Islands, Bolivia, and Tanzania.
Additionally, Rochefort has cited experimental sculptors like Ron Nagle, Ken Price, and Kathy Butterly as influences, as well as abstract painters including Joan Mitchell and Albert Oehlen. Like these artists, Rochefort prioritizes tactility in his work, inviting viewers to engage with the dualities of roughness and smoothness, opacity and translucence.
In recent years, Rochefort has been featured in solo exhibitions at prominent galleries, including Van Doren Waxter and MASSIMODECARLO. His first solo museum exhibition, “Absorption by the Sun,” was presented in 2019 at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Santa Barbara, California. His works are also part of several prominent collections, including the Montenmedio Contemporánea Foundation in Cádiz, Spain, and the Zabludowicz Collection in London.
