Becky Brown on Paul Brown's Abstraction as Antidote to Zombie Formalism

In a personal essay on Two Coats of Paint, artist and professor Becky Brown reflects on cataloguing the paintings of her 86-year-old father, Paul Brown, an abstract painter who earned his MFA at Yale in the 1960s and studied under Al Held and Alex Katz. She contrasts his labor-intensive, hand-painted abstractions—which reveal intricate networks of lines and shifting surfaces upon close viewing—with the reductive, screen-ready aesthetics of Zombie Formalism and Zombie Figuration, as critiqued by Walter Robinson and Jerry Saltz. Brown argues that her father's work, though ostensibly minimal, contains infinite depth and resists easy reproduction, unlike the empty shells of trend-driven styles. She draws parallels to cyberspace and the systems art trend identified by Emily Watlington in Art in America, and notes connections to the recent 'Electric Op' survey at the Buffalo AKG Art Museum curated by Tina Rivers Ryan. Paul Brown's paintings will be on view in a studio exhibition in Williamsburg from June 1 to June 20, 2026, by appointment.