Brian Thoreen Negotiates with Gravity with His New UNSETTLED Collection

Brian Thoreen has created a collection of objects based in this thought.  His new work exhibits visible tension between the materials that are seemingly in peril and delicately negotiating gravity.  The structure of Thoreen’s pieces combine elements and materials that rely on one another for stability. The glass forms reach for each other but can’t quite make the distance while marble hovers over glass appearing to defy physics.  Each piece becomes self-supporting and functional only through the careful calibration of weight, balance and space - a formula Thoreen is known to master. 

UNSETTLED, Brian Thoreen's first solo exhibition
Open now at Patrick Parrish Gallery, NYC
Until March 25, 2017

Understanding what it means to be unsettled is the most temporal questions we can be asking today. 

In creating the new collection, Thoreen first established a set of guidelines from which its forms could develop organically, prohibiting the use of any fasteners and requiring each piece to utilize at least two of the three materials in his palette: marble, bronze, and smoked glass. He then sought to process those materials as honestly as possible, using the most straightforward path to obtain each component's required weight, size, shape, and effect. A pair of raw bronze cylinders, for example, were cast only just as large as necessary to anchor his Reaching Console, while the marble block on the Cantilever Table is sized to provide enough balance to the unsupported end of the glass.