NOVEMBER 7, 2023 – JANUARY 3, 2024

Opening Reception with the Artist
Tuesday, November 7, 5-7PM

SOCO Gallery is pleased to announce the opening of Midnight, a solo exhibition by artist Brian Rochefort. The gallery will host a public opening reception with the artist on November 7th from 5 - 7 PM in SOCO Annex. This will be the artist’s first solo exhibition with the gallery.

Midnight features 15 of Rochefort’s ceramic vessels ranging in size from 12 to 3 inches in height, including his “paint cans” alongside new, smaller explorations of materials. Rochefort creates one-of-a-kind mixed media sculptures that combine ceramics and glazes in abstract patterns and textures. DeKooning, Joan Mitchell, Ken Price, Albert Oehlen are cited as a few of the Abstract Expressionist and contemporary painters and sculptors that have influenced the artist. 

The vessels are an exploration of color and texture created by over 30 glazes, clays, slips and pigments.  The custom-blended pigments are combined with the glazes, glass fragments and earthenware to create interpretations of craters, volcanos and reefs. The artist has spent the last few years traveling throughout Latin America and Africa to UNESCO World Heritage sites in remote areas – the Amazon, the Sierra Negra Crater in Ecuador, live volcanoes in Nicaragua, and Ngorongoro Crater in Tanzania.  Influenced by these natural phenomena – protected barrier reefs and tropical cloud forests – the ceramics are hand built and create new, extraordinary landscapes with overflowing colored drips and bubbles. 

“I try to get as much variation as possible,” Rochefort says, and with each brush stroke of glaze and subsequent trip to the kiln, another layer of cracking and peeling slip, glossy speckles, bumpy drips or meringue-like fluff emerges.” (New York Times Style Magazine, 2019) The rich colors and extravagant surfaces of each piece are  unique and  a testament to the artist’s rigorous investigations into process and material.

Brian Rochefort (American, B. 1985)

Brian Rochefort (b. 1985) lives and works in Los Angeles, CA. He holds a BFA from Rhode Island School of Design (2007) and participated in the Lillian Fellowship Residency at the Archie Bray Foundation (2009). Rochefort's first solo museum exhibition, Absorption by the Sun, was exhibited at Santa Barbara Museum of Art, CA (2019). Solo gallery exhibitions include Van Doren Waxter and 11R, New York, NY; Massimo De Carlo, London and Milan; Caterina Tognon, Venice, Italy; Sorry We're Closed, Brussels, Belgium; and Bernier Eliades, Athens. Group exhibitions include: The Cabin, Los Angeles, CA; Sorry We're Closed, Brussels; Retrospective Gallery, Hudson, NY; and Steve Turner, Los Angeles, CA. Rochefort was included in the museum exhibitions Artifices Instables, Stories of Ceramics at Nouveau Musee National de Monaco, Monte Carlo, Monaco; Cool Clay at Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento, CA; Regarding George Ohr at Boca Raton Museum of Art, FL; and From Funk to Punk at Everson Museum of Art, NY.