January 7 - 30
First Thursday Art Walk - Thursday January 7th, 5-8pm
George Brandt: Spiritual Excavations 1984 - 2026 features textured mix-media paintings and assemblage confronting inter generational trauma. Through haunting figures and heavily layered surfaces, the work unearths and overcomes the painful legacy of my father’s Holocaust survival in Poland - a history that indelibly altered and to this day haunts our entire family.
Artist Statement
Spiritual Excavations 1984–2026 is a vital, four-decade retrospective exploring the profound weight of intergenerational trauma. This body of work serves as both a psychological excavation and a site of healing, directly confronting the painful legacy bequeathed by my father, whose horror filled experiences in Poland during the holocaust have indelibly affected the lives of our entire family.
My process mirrors the physical and emotional act of excavation. Building heavy layers of acrylic paint on paper and board, I utilize destructured impasto, decollage, and subtractive mark-making to reveal what lies beneath. Through violent, tactile actions—gouging, scraping, and excoriation— I tear into the surface to expose the psychological scars embedded within the family narrative.
Woven into these visceral surfaces are the fragments of displaced lives and memories. I incorporate raw, evocative materials: human hair, fabric, bird feathers and down, along with fractured elements like broken mirror and glass, twigs, straw, photographs, and old newspaper. Together, these assemblages manifest the fragmentation of a shattered past.
By accumulating, destroying, and rebuilding these elements over forty years, the artistic process becomes a vehicle for liberation. This exhibition does not merely document historical horror; it actively seeks to dismantle and overcome its painful legacy, transforming inherited trauma into a physical manifestation of resilience and survival.