Alice Browne (b. 1986, Oxford) is a British artist based in London who completed her MA in Fine Art Painting at the Royal College of Art, London in 2016 and her BA in Fine Art Painting at Wimbledon College of Art, London in 2009.

Browne’s practice is predominantly painting-based and expands into installation, drawing and sculpture. Drawing on an expanse of influences and materials, her painted works describe obscure imaginative spaces, which simultaneously appear to adhere to the rules of gravity and perspective whilst outwardly ignoring them. Boxes, shadows, screens and girders mingle with drips, floating transparent forms and abstract geometric shapes.

Underlying Browne’s research is a notion that physical experiences take place in collaboration with a network of secondary and imaginative sources resulting in an intoxicating, partly fictional, reality. Recent works have included references to Botticelli’s illustrations of Dante’s ‘Inferno’ (~1480-90), the practices of cleromancy and astrology, the transformative power of the hand in the zero-sum game of scissor-paper-stone, Stéphane Mallarmé’s poem ‘A Throw of the Dice Will Never Abolish Chance’ (1897) and the shrine as a place of worship and sacrifice. Themes of impending chaos, speculative futurology, imaginative epic travel and personal striving meet with layers of colour, architectural references, maps and drawings of navigational cairns.

In 2017 Alice Browne was awarded a Studio Residency and Bursary Award at Hospitalfield, Scotland, by New Contemporaries: an independent platform for emerging artists based in the UK.

Before Alice Browne joined FLATLAND in 2018 she was greatly represented by Limoncello, London until gallery owner Rebecca May Marston stopped her gallery in 2017. In 2016 her work was presented at Frieze Art Fair in London by Limoncello. In 2011 and 2012 she was part of the exhibition Young British Art I and II resp at Limoncello and DIENSTGEBÄUDE art space in Zurich, curated by artist Ryan Gander. In 2011 her work was curated by artist Shaun McDowell in the groupshow ‘Nothing Fixed’ at Marcelle Joseph Project / London with work from Varda Caivano, Raoul de Keyser, Christopher Green, Howard Hodgkin, Ralph Hunter-Menzies, Shaun McDowell and Wendy McLean. In 2010 she was selected in the exhibition New Contemporaries which showed at A Foundation, Liverpool and ICA London by Mark Leckey (Turner prize), Dawn Mellor and Gabriel Kuri. Browne had other solo shows at the OUTPOST Gallery, Norwich (2015), Prosjektrom Normanns, Stavanger (2014), Supercollider Contemporary Art Projects, Blackpool (2012) and Jerwood Project Space (2011).

 

Please read the transcript of a talk with Jilian Knipe in London on her practice:

http://thisistomorrow.info/articles/alice-browne-in-conversation-with-jillian-knipe