Brett Reichman

Who is Brett Reichman?

Brett Reichman is a painter and Associate Professor at the San Francisco Art Institute where he teaches in both the graduate and undergraduate programs. Born in Pittsburgh PA, he has lived and worked in San Francisco since 1984. His work came to fruition in the late 1980s out of cultural activism that addressed the AIDS epidemic and gay identity politics and was curated into early exhibitions that acknowledged those formative issues. These exhibitions included Situation: Perspectives on Work by Lesbian and Gay Artists at New Langton Arts in San Francisco, The Anti-Masculine at the Kim Light Gallery in Los Angeles, Beyond Loss at the Washington Project for the Arts in Washington, D.C, and In A Different Light: Visual Culture, Sexual Identity, Queer Practice at the Berkeley Art Museum, Berkeley, CA.

Reichman’s inquiry into the politics of gay culture critiques political correctness and cultural assimilation, however the approach to realism is never simply reproductive. He separates the concept of Realism from Naturalism within a discourse that views popular culture as anxious, obsessed with artificiality and unnatural beauty. His pictures take lubricious fantasy to the point of ridicule, without losing completely a quotient of psychological truth.