ROSS M BROWN

My work engages with the language of visionary architecture—those ambitious, often unrealised structures that occupy the space between utopia and ruin. Through painting, I construct imagined forms that echo both abandoned modernist proposals and speculative models for an impossible future.

Works such as Fabrication (Pink), Fabrication (Yellow), and Maquette 3 operate like architectural maquettes: compact, autonomous structures presented for consideration. These are not blueprints for inhabitable space, but painted proposals—visual studies in the aesthetics of mass, material, and modularity. They borrow from the logic of Brutalism and paper architecture, yet remain unbuilt and unbuildable.

By combining illusionistic textures—rendered wood grain, formica, concrete—with hard-edged geometric compositions, the paintings mimic the materials of construction while denying physical presence. The resulting forms feel monumental yet weightless, rational yet psychologically charged.

I’m interested in the afterlife of architecture—how idealised forms persist, fragment, or distort over time. Through the act of painting, I reassemble these fragments into new propositions: part monument, part failure, part dream.