Brian Thoreen

Artist and designer Brian Thoreen shares his radical relationship with materials and materiality by playfully blurring the boundaries between functional and non-functional work. Born in California in 1979, he grew up surrounded by construction, metal fabrication and art installation, experiences that shaped his distinctive and intimate understanding of space and material interaction.

Now working between Mexico City and Paris, his practice navigates the precarious tensions between simplicity and sophistication, discourse and form, materiality and striking evocation. Whether working with rubber, wax, paper, silicone, hammered copper, brass or bronze, Thoreen interrogates the very integrity of his chosen materials, bending them to his powerful vision.

Central to his artistic enquiry is a challenge to harmony as a prevailing beauty norm. By flirting with both the sensual and the objectionable, Thoreen celebrates the strangeness within the familiar, leaving viewers with an evocative and enduring sense of awe and uncanniness.

He is a founding partner of the Mexico City gallery MASA and the experimental glass studio Vissio. His works have been exhibited and acquired internationally across both art and design contexts.