NEW YORK, NY.- The Tibor de Nagy Gallery is presenting an exhibition of over 50 rarely seen works by Joe Brainard (1942–1994). Included in the exhibition are collages, paintings, watercolors, and ink drawings. More than half the works in the exhibition are on loan from private collections.

Brainard is best known for his small scale collages and works on paper. Although he knew Andy Warhol and considered him among his favorite artists (along with de Kooning), Brainard’s works are often humorous and earnest, in contrast to the cool detachment of much of the Pop art of the period. His work combines a technical skill and gift for composition along with seemingly endless invention and imagination.

Brainard grew up in Tulsa, Oklahoma and moved to New York in 1960. He gained early recognition with his first solo exhibition in 1965. Over the next decade he exhibited regularly and his work was included in numerous museum exhibitions in the United States and abroad. Brainard’s work was the subject of a traveling retrospective in 2001 that was presented at MoMA P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center in Long Island City and the Berkeley Art Museum. His drawings, collages, assemblages, and paintings are in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art among many others.

His early paintings and assemblages showed the influence of Jasper Johns, Andy Warhol, and Joseph Cornell, but Joe's work soon distinguished itself by its lyricism, wit, warmth, and generosity, combined with his penchant for making art that was unabashedly beautiful. Joe's work ethic and singleness of purpose—as well as his use of amphetamine—allowed him to produce art at an astonishing rate. For example, his 1975 show at Fischbach consisted of 1,500 miniature works. It was praised by New York Times art critic John Russell as "the wittiest show of the winter." (Along the way, other critics who admired his work included James Schuyler, Robert Rosenblum, John Ashbery, Peter Schjeldahl, Carter Ratcliff, Jed Perl, and Hilton Kramer).