BRIANNA BASS
FOR ALL INQUIRIES, EMAIL BRIANNAKBASS@GMAIL.COM
BIO
Brianna Bass is a color field painter whose evolving systems study the intersection of order and dissolution. In fields of mapped cells, incremental color mixtures methodically interact and transform, infusing abstraction with the poetics of language, physics, and cosmology. Bass received an MFA in Painting and Printmaking from the Yale School of Art in 2022 and a BFA in Painting and Drawing from the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga in 2013. She has presented solo exhibitions internationally and throughout the United States, including Ex Nihilo in 2025 at Red Arrow Gallery in Nashville, Scattering the Constant in 2023 at Latchkey Gallery in New York City, Penumbra in 2022 in Naples, Italy, and Chromophone at Missouri State University in 2020. Her work has been included in group exhibitions at institutions such as Jeffery Deitch in New York, The Green Family Art Foundation in Dallas, Ojiri Gallery in London, and the Tree Art Museum in Beijing. She has participated in major art fairs including Armory 2026 in NYC, Untitled 2023 & 2024 in Miami, and Expo Chicago in 2024. In addition to her studio practice, Bass founded Mineral House Media as an active archive for arts writing and curatorial work. In 2025 She was invited to install Sol Lewitt Wall Drawing 824 at Yale through the Sol Lewitt Foundation and Paula Cooper Gallery. She has presented lectures at Yale University, Pratt Institute, and the University of Louisville, and has taught painting at Yale College. She is a recipient of the Carol Schlosberg Memorial Prize for Excellence in Painting from the Yale School of Art. She will be the November & December artist-in-residence at Galeria Enlace in Lima, Peru.
STATEMENT
My paintings are diagrammatic color games, a study of evolving systems at the intersection of order and disintegration. Drawing from geometries of color, the paintings begin with fastidiously mapped grids. The cells are then populated with systems of incremental color mixtures, infusing abstraction with the poetics of language, physics, and cosmology. Each band flows through a journey of transformation across the field, and pattern enables the painting to be deciphered despite the phenomenologically uncertain nature of color theory.
Color is unpredictable and defined by change, each instance of color shifting radically in response to its surroundings. Through my experiences with hearing loss, these processes come to the foreground and inform my perception of painting. In this way, a painting is like an utterance, a stream of chaotic phonemes. Patterns filtered through disintegrating algorithms are like utterances with missing information, requiring predictive maps to synthesize noise into meaning. Colors similarly behave like packets of sound, and visual systems create the legible image. When missing information collapses the map, the field of observation oscillates between form and formlessness.
The eye also fuses particulate colors at a distance to form the impression of new colors, a haze that can be examined to find its elements, but never exactly named. The fusion is in the eye, the air, the brain, while the individual unit remains separate. Randomly coalesced paint nodes present extra textural noise that ties painterly language to cosmological materiality. Planetary rings, galaxies, and atmospheres, like utterances and color fields, are all composed of smaller things. This is the composition of form in my work: it emerges as its components float together, connected by an invisible force.
Distance necessitates abstraction. In observing deep-space objects beyond imaging, the system is essential. Spectroscopy, the interpretation of electromagnetic spectra as they interact with matter, is a fundamental tool in remote sensing to determine a form’s elemental composition, temperature, velocity, and other aspects of its being. Far-distant galaxies from the beginning of the Universe can be detected this way, capturing light that has been hurtling through space for 13.5 billion years, looking back in time to study the Universe’s earliest eras, right after the Big Bang, when stars and black holes first began to form. The deepest fusion of language and cosmology is what brings these realities to cognitive form: systems of arbitrary design.
Abstraction appears both in very small and very large realms. Minuscule and massive forces produce shapes strange to the logic of our animal scale. Translating those strange forms into familiar ones is the job of language, through the mechanisms of technology. There is always something immense and complex hovering outside our ability to fully sense and understand it. Abstraction is the inevitable lens through which we examine the deciphering systems themselves. It is important that my work maintains a degree of formlessness because that is the nature of information as it is transferred through space and time, be it light or utterance. Through pattern and subtle variation, the form coalesces, even if total clarity is elusive. It is more important to focus on the state of searching, the yearning to understand, and the design of languages deployed to do so. This is cognition in flux, as alchemical and generative as solving the riddle itself.