Danny Bredar’s practice embraces a diversity of techniques and genres to engage in a multifaceted augmentation and collapsing of the nature of individuality, in a boundaryless affront to the stylistic formula of the art world’s current paradigm.
He makes figurative and abstract oil paintings, ceramics, artist books, novels, and assemblage, among other minor forms — a mosaic of morphing approaches that amount to a metafiction about existence, detachment, and art’s capacity for specificity. The prolific range of his practice is a position that welcomes detailed and sustained searching, an attentiveness that senses experimental connections, and that delves into the encrypted contradictions that define our time. While each move is highly intentional and personal, Bredar’s program allows for immediacy, inauthenticity, and inhuman extension… a move toward deeper honesty and a mimetic vision of what it means to live now, in all its fast, fragmentary, thrilling, and efficient incoherence.
The artist is influenced by Velázquez, Cézanne, Kippenberger, Picabia, Broodthaers, Polke, Hanne Darboven, David Hammons, Jef Geys, and Stephan Dillemuth. Growing out of loss, alienation, and detachment at the source of cultural development and personal life — not knowing what existence is — Bredar’s body of work observes from the edge, outside of things, and reconfigures texture into text.
Danny Bredar (b. 1992, Denver, CO) lives and works in Chicago, IL. He received his MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2019 and his BA from Harvard University in 2014. Recent solo and group exhibitions include STARS, the Dallas Invitational Art Fair, Tureen (Dallas), Rhona Hoffman Gallery (Chicago), David Lewis Gallery (NYC), Caffé Centrale (Monte Castello di Vibio, Umbria), and The Arts Club of Chicago. Bredar’s work has been exhibited at Soccer Club Club, Taqueria Los Alamos, the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts at Harvard University, the Armory Show 2020, the Elmhurst Art Museum, Taos Center for the Visual Arts, Sullivan Galleries, Sandbox Industries, Extase, and with the fictional gallery Currency in Münster and Zurich. Bredar has collaborated with Leah Ke Yi Zheng, with whom he received a 2019-22 Fellowship at The Arts Club of Chicago. He currently teaches undergraduate seminars at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.