Frederick Brosen in his studio; courtesy of the Artist
A native New Yorker, Frederick Brosen began his studies at City College of New York, graduating in 1976. He attended art classes at the Art Students League and then earned his M.F.A. degree from Pratt Institute in 1979. Frederick Brosen’s recognition began shortly thereafter, when his work was included in the annual "Art on Paper" exhibition at the Weatherspoon Art Gallery in Greensboro, North Carolina and in the group exhibition, "Architectural Images," at the Summit Art Center in New Jersey. In 1983, the first solo gallery exhibition for Frederick Brosen was presented by Staempfli Gallery in New York.
Since then, Frederick Brosen’s watercolors have been featured in over thirty museum and gallery exhibitions across the country, including the National Academy of Design and the American Academy of Arts and Letters in New York; The Bruce Museum and Wadsworth Atheneum in Connecticut; McNay Museum in San Antonio; and Huntington Museum of Art in West Virginia. Solo exhibitions for Frederick Brosen have been presented at the Huntington Museum of Art in West Virginia (1998); Frye Art Museum in Seattle (2002); South Street Seaport Museum in New York (2012-13); and The Museum of the City of New York (2005-06 and 2024).
Frederick Brosen depicts urban landscapes in lushly painted watercolors with subtle jewel-toned and earthy palettes. His distinctive architectural vistas are imbued with a sense of romance and historical significance, discovered on foot or traveling by bike at dawn to avoid the hustle-bustle of daily metropolitan life. He photographs and sketches at a location several times, before returning to his studio to paint, with precise draftsmanship, carefully considered compositions and countless details to describe the scene.
Brosen describes how he looks for places where complex streetscapes have created themselves: factories, garages, churches, and homes sit side-by-side along a pedestrian street; Temples, churches, mosques, and banks coexist with skyscrapers, carriage houses and tenements. He seeks to create a unique sculptural vocabulary of ornament; Neo-classical adornments, gargoyles, cornices, storefront signs, wrought iron gates, cobblestones, and water towers, that co-exist within one cityscape, seamlessly layering the past and the present in a haunting juxtaposition between the monumental and the banal.
Works by Frederick Brosen are represented in many public institutions, including the Arkansas Museum of Fine Art in Little Rock; Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento, California; Hood Museum of Art in Hanover, New Hampshire; Knoxville Museum of Art in Tennessee; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York Historical Society and Rockefeller Foundation in New York; Newark Museum in New Jersey; and the Michigan University Museum of Art in Ann Arbor. Frederick Brosen’s work is included in the personal collections of David Hyde Pierce, Rita Rich, Mr. and Mrs. Wilbur Ross and Billy Wilder, as well as the corporate collections of the John Hancock Company, Massachusetts Financial Services, Merrill Lynch, and NYNEX.
In 2010, Mr. Brosen was awarded the Lifetime Career Achievement Award from the City College of New York. He was previously recognized with a Silver Medal of Honor by the Royal Society of Arts & Letters in London (1976) and two Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grants (1995 and 2007).
The monograph, "Still New York: Paintings by Frederick Brosen," was published by The Vendome Press in 2005 with an introduction by Ric Burns and essays by Alan Feuer.