10 march 2026, Flor Linckens
James Brown in the sculpture garden of Livingstone Gallery
Until 22 August, Livingstone Gallery in The Hague presents the exhibition ‘Jaipur Revisited’ in its sculpture garden, featuring sculptures by the American artist James Brown. The presentation is part of a new initiative by the gallery in which the garden takes on a different character twice a year, with a single artist temporarily shaping the atmosphere of the space. For this edition, the gallery chose Brown, an artist known for a distinctive visual language marked by symbolism, materiality and intuition.
James Brown was born in Los Angeles in 1951. He studied Painting and Printmaking at Immaculate Heart College in Hollywood and later continued his studies at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. In the years that followed, he worked alternately in Paris, New York and Mexico. In the 1990s, he settled with his family in Oaxaca in southern Mexico, where a significant part of his later oeuvre took shape. During this period he began working with oil paint and occasionally used unusual supports, such as the reverse side of folded linen maps. Brown died in 2020, alongside his wife, as the result of a tragic car accident.
The artist maintained a special connection with the Netherlands. His first solo exhibition took place in 1978 at what is now Museum Arnhem, when Brown was only 27 years old. Since then, his work has entered the collections of the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), the Centraal Museum in Utrecht, Museum Arnhem, the KW Institute of Contemporary Art and Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin.
For Brown the making of a work was rarely a linear process but rather a sequence of responses. Each intervention emerged in relation to what was already present on the surface. That way, his compositions developed step by step through a constant interplay between material and intuition. His semi-abstract practice was interdisciplinary and encompassed painting, drawing, collage, sculpture and artist’s books. Symbols, spiritual references, cosmic and archetypal forms and signs frequently appear in his work, informed by both Western and non-Western artistic traditions, by science and by his travels across Europe.
Livingstone Gallery now presents a selection of his sculptures under the title ‘Jaipur Revisited’, a reference to an international sculpture exhibition that took place in 2017 in the former palace of the Maharaja of Jaipur in India. The exhibition was curated by Peter Nagy and brought together contemporary sculptures within the historic rooms of the palace, including works by Brown. Today, the sculptures appear in a very different setting, where they enter into dialogue with the open space and the skies above The Hague.
