Press Release - Within and All Around by Brett Flanigan
Brett Flanigan
Rich Bog
Oil on canvas
71 x 59 inches framed by artist
2026
Within and All Around
a solo exhibition by
Brett Flanigan
Opening Saturday, July 25th at 6pm
pt.2
1523b Webster St.
Oakland, CA
pt.2 Gallery is pleased to present Within and All Around, Brett Flanigan’s fifth solo exhibition with the gallery. Featuring new paintings alongside ceramic works, the exhibition reflects an evolving dialogue within Flanigan’s practice. His recent exploration of clay and glaze has informed a return to painting, introducing new approaches to color, composition, and the role of material process.
Within and All Around refers both to the sensation of light in the works and to the forces that shape them. Throughout the exhibition, alternating gradients appear to illuminate forms from within, but also from around the works. At the same time, Flanigan's practice is deeply self-referential, with each body of work informing the next, while material constraints, chance, and process exert their influence from all around. Together, the works explore how complexity emerges from simple beginnings.
Brett Flanigan
Bolide
Glazed stoneware
12.25 x 14.5 inches in walnut frame
2026
Over recent years, Flanigan's engagement with ceramics has transformed his understanding of color. Working with clay and mineral-based glazes introduced a palette grounded in earth and chemistry rather than the direct mixing of paint. The resulting works embrace restraint, favoring subtle shifts over dramatic contrast. Drawing from the earthy, often "muddy" qualities of ceramic glazes, Flanigan narrows his palette to reveal increasingly nuanced relationships between tones. The longer one spends with the work, the more distinctions emerge. Colors that initially appear uniform gradually separate into unexpected variations, rewarding sustained looking and revealing a quiet complexity beneath the surface.
Many of the geometric structures found throughout the exhibition originated in Flanigan's ceramic practice. Broken slabs, modular arrangements, and patterns created through dipping clay into glaze generate compositions that reappear in both paint and clay. Forms first discovered through chance are translated, expanded, and revisited throughout the exhibition.
Light serves as a connective thread across the work. In the paintings, forms appear illuminated from within, while also suggesting a light source beyond the picture plane reflected back through the surface. The ceramics similarly capture and refract light through their glazed surfaces, revealing subtle shifts in color and texture as the viewer moves around them. Whether working in paint or clay, Flanigan invites close observation, encouraging viewers to linger with subtle variations in color, texture, and form.
Brett Flanigan
The Story is in the Soil
Oil on canvas
21 x 17 inches in walnut frame
2026
In Within and All Around, painting and ceramics are brought into conversation through a shared vocabulary of fractured geometry, restrained color, and luminous form. What initially appears simple gradually unfolds into something far more complex.
Brett Flanigan (b. 1986, Great Falls, MT) lives and works in Los Angeles, CA. Flanigan holds a degree in Biology from the University of California, Santa Barbara. He works primarily in painting and sculpture. His work has been exhibited in the San Francisco Bay Area, Los Angeles, New York City, Portland, Atlanta and Chicago, as well as internationally in Hamburg, Germany and Warsaw, Poland. He has produced commissioned projects as a resident artist with Meta Open Arts and the Google AIR program. Flanigan has also completed a number of public artworks, including a mural at the Lilley Museum of Art at the University of Nevada, Reno, and an outdoor public sculpture in downtown Oakland.