Color 9.2 Buy This Issue Now

• 
• 

Brendan Flanagan’s latest series of oil and acrylic paintings (shown recently at New York’s Thierry Goldberg Projects and Toronto’s Angell Gallery) see the young Toronto-based artist trading landscapes for interior views. What might be considered tame subject matter, until one is faced with his strange, surreal, epically scaled panels. Working within a long tradition of figurative expressionism (think the tortured, alienated characters of Edvard Munch and Francis Bacon; Julian Schnabel’s 80s neo-expressionism or more recently, Daniel Richter’s thermal-tinged tableaux), Flanagan’s wildly clashing compositions, at their best, evince similar psychological affect.