“Like a modern version of Italian artist Modigliani’s figures, Brooks’ portrayals of women are not overly dreamlike or unreal, but aim to serve as a lyrical device to accentuate their narrative.”
— HI-FRUCTOSE MAGAZINE
“His images of elongated female subjects in film noir settings have become signature works in the modern pop surrealist movement.”
— Corey Helford Gallery
“The ‘women of Troy’ present an elaborate pageantry of characters observed in allegorical settings. These women play out intimate scenes through a detailed visual language. They are usually caught in moments where something transformative has or is about to happen. ”
-JUXTAPOZ MAGAZINE
His new work looks like they were painted with cotton swabs and dandelion seed heads… A cast of shimmering characters”
-Globe And Mail
My mother told me I started trying to draw at the age of two and a half. As a watercolorist specializing in still lifes, she was my first influence; I must have been trying to emulate her. But while her subjects were local barns and bridges, I was sketching the women in the old black-and-white movies she kept on in the afternoons.
Those films became my primary teachers in lighting and visual storytelling. I spent years scouring used bookstores for collections of old Hollywood studio photography and haunting the town library to pour over massive volumes of cinematic stills. From the silent era through the 1950s, I drew everything I could get my hands on, obsessed with capturing that rich, atmospheric lighting and moody narrative tension. This was my only formal training; by the time I began trying to develop my own images, the vintage cinematic aesthetic was already baked into my hand.
This lack of traditional instruction allowed me to develop a unique blend of techniques that set my work apart. When I eventually looked toward the gallery world, I didn’t seem to fit in the world of fine art. However, once I began sharing my work online, it quickly gained traction, leading to an invitation to exhibit with a Toronto gallery in 2009.
The turning point came in 2010 with my first large-scale solo exhibition, VIRAGO. The response was transformative, attracting a global audience and launching a career that has since seen my work exhibited across three continents.
“Brooks has garnered an international reputation for his disproportioned “girls,” a continuing body of work that revolves around female characters who assert their strength, glamour, danger, or apathy toward the viewer through a detailed visual language, Ultimately revealing complicated relationships to power.”
— COREY HELFORD GALLERY, L.A.
“Brooks looks at the contradictions of artificiality through portraits of androgynous women captured at the height of their own private dramas. Presenting them spot-lit, Troy makes them appear almost like film stars, enhancing the suggestion of potent hidden narratives. In this way his women seem somehow prisoners of their own exuberance, beholden to their decadent impulses whilst also lucid enough to perceive their own folly.”
— JAMES FREEMAN GALLERY, London, UK