Mia Brownell paints intertwined vines of intricate clusters of ripe fruit spiraling in meandering structures suspended in space. Employing dramatic chiaroscuro and bold perspectival devices, Brownell’s illusionistic still life fantasies simultaneously reference Baroque painting and the coiling configurations of DNA, amino acids, and protein chains. Donald Kuspit describes Brownell’s work as “standing between the supermarket and the museum- in the commercial cornucopia of modern America and the grand tradition of Old Master still life.” Brownell takes a long established genre, considered minor and peripheral in the modernist canon, and serves up a meditation on the genetic modification of food inviting us to celebrate and wonder at the rapturous beauty and poignant fragility of nature.

Mia Brownell lives in New Rochelle, NY and teaches at Southern Connecticut State University in New Haven, CT. Her paintings have been recently exhibited at Wave Hill, Bronx, NY and the Big Orbit Gallery in Buffalo, NY and she will have a solo show at the National Academy of Sciences in Washington, DC later this year. This is her first solo exhibition in Boston.