BRAD EBERHARD in Modern Painters February 2010
By Michael Duncan
Published: February 1, 2010
Modern Painters/artinfo.com
"Cross Sections" at Thomas Solomon Gallery
Los Angeles
Oct. 17 – Nov. 14, 2009
Los Angeles is not really known for abstraction, but younger artists here can’t seem to stay away from it. Brad Eberhard is one of the best of the new practitioners, steering clear of murk and mess in fresh works open to the colors and shapes of the real world. Coming on the heels of his first solo painting show at Thomas Solomon, "Cross Sections," an exhibition of 11 collages, was a playful affair, mixing acrylic and oil forms with small images copped from children’s-book illustrations and flash cards.
Shape + Color = Earth set the tone, with a fat cutout worm slithering over a grid of numbered multicolored dots like a move in Snakes and Ladders. All the works burrowed into formal preconceptions and toyed with art’s oddball manipulation of two-dimensional space. Flatness was a Lichtenstein-like joke in which Mondrian-plaid toothpaste oozed from its tube onto a brush. Cutout shapes were at sea in Unfurling, loosely taking the form of a tipsy galleon with billowing Constructivist sails.
Fish Finder — named for a sonar device once used by Eberhard’s father, an amateur fisherman — presented a kind of deconstructed roller coaster of belts and gears whirling around a single happy-go-lucky goldfish. All this ado was about something: the hidden systems within the networks, technology, and factions of modern life. Eberhard’s giddy, upbeat collages celebrate the loopiness of the sprawl.
The full text of the review can be found at http://www.artinfo.com/news/story/33604/brad-eberhard/