Bret Slater’s paintings are hybrid objects: painting and sculpture as anthropomorphic surrogates. Slater’s lumpy layers of acrylic paint coat the surface and edges of the canvas, challenging the plasticity of the medium while revealing a handmade quality. Slater’s small-scale paintings are small in the extreme, the size of an IPod or other ubiquitous handheld device. The discrete and luminous blocks of color in his larger works, alongside their synthetic surfaces, call to mind action figures, comic books, and other fetishes of boyhood. His work balances composition and materials with shapes that feel natural--functional even, like a future technology--in colors that could be described as toxic punk.

Slater received a B.F.A. (2009) from Purchase College, SUNY, Purchase, NY, and a M.F.A. (2011) from the Meadows School of the Arts at Southern Methodist University, Dallas. He has recently had exhibitions with Louis B. James, New York, annex14, Zürich, CH, Thomas Robertello Gallery, Chicago and Mihai Nicodim, Los Angelos. His work is in the permanent collections of the Dallas Museum of Art and the Indianapolis Museum of Art. His work has been included in reviews and articles such as; The New Yorker, The New York Observer, Modern Painters, D Magazine, NPR, F/D Luxe: The Dallas Morning News, Glasstire, Modern Luxury, and The Huffington Post, among others. Bret Slater was born in the Bronx and currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.