KADAR BROCK

Miles McEnery Gallery is pleased to present coming home, New York-based artist Kadar Brock’s first solo exhibition with the gallery. The exhibition is on view 4 September through 25 October 2025 at our 515 West 22nd Street gallery. Accompanying the exhibition is a fully illustrated digital catalogue featuring an essay by Alex Bacon.

Kadar Brock’s painterly process is one where destruction begets creation; he begins by applying layers of paint to stretched canvas, only to unstretch it, and erode the very image he’s created with a power sander and razor blade. Cycling through this process, each repetition excavates layers of paint beneath it, and blurs the boundaries between them until the final composition becomes an amalgam of each constituent part. Each iteration of this destructive process introduces an element of chance, as Brock unearths hidden paths of paint beneath the surface, which guide his mark-making in the last steps of his process.

As Alex Bacon notes, “With time, Brock has added (literal) layers and complexities to his process . . . rather than simply revealing the painting’s ‘subconscious,’ Brock now responds to it by going back into the work after sanding it, painting in and along fractures and fissures in the work’s surface and allowing the unpredictable idiosyncrasies his process reveals in the work to direct how it arrives at its final state.”

Akin to Rauschenberg’s Erased de Kooning Drawing, the significance of Brock’s paintings lies not in any initial object, but in the traces they leave behind. Here, the past bleeds into the present—each sheen of paint, sanded edge, or break in the canvas is an archaeological clue that gestures towards, without ever overtly stating, what has come before.

This interplay of time and memory has become especially relevant in Brock’s recent body of work, which focuses on the aesthetics of indoctrination in The Movement of Spiritual Inner Awareness (MSIA), the New Age religion his parents were members of in his childhood, which is widely regarded as a cult. Imagery from MSIA is layered into his paintings, sourced from newspapers, publications, and other ephemera Brock has collected and archived. In this way, Brock’s paintings not only engage with the materiality of his craft, but also subject the iconography and ideology of his upbringing to the same process of erosion and transformation.