“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
“The ‘women of Troy’ present an elaborate pageantry of female 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
Troy Brooks is a contemporary painter. His images of elongated female subjects in film noir settings have been globally recognized as signature works in the modern pop surrealist movement, with exhibitions in Paris, Berlin, London, New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Toronto, Montreal and Australia. In 2018 he relocated from Toronto to a 19th century bank in the historic Ontario town of Wallaceburg, turning it into his main studio work space.
My mother took up watercolour painting around the time I was born. My earliest memories are drawing beside her easel in the living room. I usually drew the women I saw in the old black and white movies that played on TV in the afternoons. When I started school I found a big book in the library of classic film with beautiful stills of some of the women I’d been drawing from the TV. This began a life long passion of classic Hollywood studio photographers. I made thousands of sketches from every cinema book of vintage stills I could find. From the silent era through to the 50’s. This was my training in the visual arts. Everything I learned about light, shadow, composition and narrative was from the photographers of the studio era. Eventually, by the time I started creating my own characters with oil paint, that vintage cinematic style was baked into my technique. I went through a painful and expensive trial and error period in which a distinct style surfaced through my ignorance of more traditional approaches. As I never saw work in fine art galleries similar to what I was doing, I assumed it would never be taken seriously in that world. Then one day, while visiting a friend’s loft in Toronto, I saw a large print on the wall by a pop surrealism artist named Lori Earley. That was when I discovered there was a contemporary art movement that I already unknowingly belonged to, although it hadn’t reached Canada. I soon managed to get my first proper gallery show in 2009, and then my first large scale solo exhibition, “VIRAGO” in 2010. After the surprising success of that show I was able to focus completely on my work. Since then my paintings have been shown in galleries and museums around the world.
Selected Press
“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.
“Surrealist, film noir paintings that drip with classic Hollywood glamour and drama.”
— Katy Cowan, Creative Boom
“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
