Biography
Lex Braes is an artist and educator of 20 years in the School of Architecture, Pratt Institute.
Experience in the built environment provides him with a useful template, one that allows the integration of tacit knowledge with analytical observation. An innovative process based on the critical inquiry and curiosity of routine body movements. Professor Braes guides architecture students towards their personal discoveries; which questions will challenge a priori reasoning and conditioning while contributing to resolutions in autonomous design.
Braes' formative years were profoundly influenced by two mentors, one traditional and one avant-garde. Scottish poet Sydney Scroggie's visual intelligence proved fundamental to expanding the young painter's understanding of perception and spatial accountability. Likewise with the conceptual influence of Allan Kaprow, his University graduate advisor in San Diego, California, whose experimental performance activities took place in the indiscernible space between life and art.
Both positions have contributed to Braes' integration of hand craft skill and critical analysis in his studio making practice. Braes works across media, drawing, painting, sculpture and live performance, in collaboration with dance, music and theatre artists. He places the primitive and the naive mark in dialogue with the refined, where the symbolism of a motif might be re-discovered in the process. His aim is for a restorative type of painting, one where painting is viable to contemporary conversation.
Photo by Johan Granberg