BRANDON J. DONAHUE
REBOUNDS & ASSISTS
MEET THE ARTIST
Friday, March 11 | 5 PM - 7:30 PM
Pentimenti Gallery welcomes spring with a solo exhibition by Brandon J. Donahue. This is the artist’s first solo exhibition at Pentimenti Gallery.
Brandon J. Donahue’s long-term experimentation with aesthetics and techniques deriving from the pop art, street art, and Art Povera movements has resulted in a mastery of the formal and symbolic marriages at play in his work.
In REBOUNDS & ASSISTS, Donahue’s iconic Basketball Blooms come to Philadelphia for the first time. The works resemble floral blooms emerging from the surface of the wall, lending an organic, natural quality to the prosaic, manufactured basketballs. The alchemy Donahue performs in the creation of these pieces is characterized by an informed handling of the symbolic qualities of his materials.
Accompanying the Basketball Blooms is a new Football Bloom, as well as his latest series of screen prints entitled Coach’s Playbook. The Football Bloom was birthed out of a commissioned project from Nike Football in honor of the 2022 Super Bowl weekend. The screen prints comprising Coach’s Playbook feature the floor-plan of a courtroom with team plays drawn on top in red and blue. The works brim with playfully rendered but foreboding connotations regarding the American legal system.
Donahue’s childhood dream of becoming a professional basketball player metamorphosed into a desire to take part in a discussion of basketball within a societal, cultural framework. The works comprising this exhibition center both the artist’s own experience with basketball as a cultural lodestone, as well as the interconnecting paths that we all walk as members of larger communities with a shared responsibility to each other, and to the earth from which material is wrought. These social and environmental aspects of the work unfold like the basketballs split open, layered in a complicated, multifaceted unity.
Brandon J. Donahue (b. 1985, Memphis, TN) received his BS from Tennessee State University and MFA from the University of Tennessee in Knoxville. He has exhibited nationally and internationally at such venues as Untitled Art Miami Beach ‘21; Banneker-Douglass Museum, Annapolis, MD; Frist Museum, Nashville, TN; South Kentucky Performing Arts Center, Bowling Green, KY; 13th Havana Biennial, Matanzas, Cuba; Atlanta Contemporary, Atlanta, GA; McKenna Museum, New Orleans, LA; Athica Institute for Contemporary Art, Athens, GA; and many others. His work resides in the permanent collections of Metro Arts Nashville, Nashville, TN; Private Museum Collection, Matanzas, Cuba; Frist Art Museum, Nashville, TN; Banneker-Douglass Museum, Annapolis, MD; Rollingscrest Chillum Community Center, Chillum, MD; Madison Park, Community Center, Madison, TN; and Arrowmont School of Craft, Gatlinburg, TN.
Donahue has been included in the book publication, “Common Practice: Basketball and Contemporary Art” by Carlos Rolon. This publication covers more than a century of artwork from over two hundred leading artists—including Nina Chanel Abney, Emma Amos, Salvador Dalí, David Hammons, Barkley Hendricks, Titus Kaphar, Jacob Lawrence, Roy Lichtenstein, Sharon Lockhart, Robert Longo, Claes Oldenburg, Richard Prince, Robert Rauschenberg, Faith Ringgold, Lorna Simpson, Andy Warhol, Ai Weiwei, and Wendy White. He is the recipient of the Tanne Foundation Award, alongside numerous other awards and grants.
For all inquiries, please contact us at [email protected] or +1 215.625.9990.
