Originally from Omaha, Nebraska, Brooklyn-based Tim Brawner (b.1991) shares this controlled approach, rendering his paintings and drawings with an exacting attention to detail and exquisite mark making. Brawner scours the internet and other analog sources for material, collecting it in a “morgue” file of reference imagery he uses to develop drafts of his paintings. Influenced early in his career by masters of dark humor comics like Al Columbia; the films of Paul Verhoeven, Sam Peckinpah, and Takashi Miike; and the stories of H.P. Lovecraft and Thomas Ligotti; Brawner adroitly composes single panels that capture an instant of terror while alluding to a more sinister narrative lurking just outside the frame. Both drawings and paintings exhibit the compositional focus of a film or theater set, with the latter’s close cropping and unusual angles adding to their discomforting voyeurism and atmospheric unease.

Nothing in Brawner’s universe is quite as it should be. Much as Grünewald in his Isenheim Altarpiece—and later, George Grosz and Otto Dix in their paintings—ghoulishly distorted subjects in response to social and political turmoil, Brawner points to a certain skepticism and destabilization inherent in late capitalism and, especially, the rapid proliferation of a synthetic aesthetic. He realizes his hyperrealistic scenes using a blend of airbrushing, overpainting, and stippling that occasionally dissolves into glitchy optical confusion: simulacra has overtaken the real.