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Brad Terhune is a multi-disciplinary artist focusing on the use of the printed page as collage material. Growing up in the northern New Jersey suburbs, Terhune traces his artistic practice to a childhood spent drawing, painting and making objects, often out of found materials. After attending the School of Visual Arts, and a career that focused on staff development and collaboration, Brad decided to pursue art education as a profession. Teaching in public schools and museum settings has driven Brad to continually develop his practice, focusing on collage, painting, photography and mixed media. He participates in several nonprofits dedicated to supporting artists and the greater community; a critique group providing constructive criticism and support to its artist participants; and a cooperative gallery whose main objective is bringing art to the community in its purest form. Currently, his work utilizes found imagery and text to question our perception of visual information. Exhibiting regularly throughout the NY/NJ area, his work is in collections in Japan, England, France, and throughout the United States.
Statement
My transition to abstraction has been slow, brought upon by the increasingly nonsensical atmosphere, in particular the United States. As the absurdity of the zeitgeist has increased, my movement away from photomontage has developed into an abstraction managed by the grid, and driven by contrast, texture, and juxtaposition.
First, this direction took shape in my collage work, a series entitled The Shudder of Meaning. Coined by Roland Barthes, a leading figure in the study of semiotics, the term recognizes that, for the reader (or viewer), multiple interpretations are possible, and that the reader’s participation determines meaning, brought upon by provocation, inquiry, and disruption.
Besides some of the larger, more prominent imagery, the energy in the collages seems to be concentrated at the edges of two parts meeting or overlapping. I also repurpose graphic design elements: words, patterns, borders, etc.
The grid, and all those interacting edges, led to the paintings, the series Inflection Point. I began to see a correlation between what I was putting down on the canvas and the more recent collage work. The slight overlapping and small fragments nested in corners became the vernacular that I found aesthetically pleasing.
The term ‘inflection point’ refers to the point of a curve at which a change in the direction of curvature occurs. Given the contrast between my use of right angles and horizontal and vertical lines, and the more expressive markmaking I’ve employed, the term’s reference to change is what ultimately grabbed my attention.
As these two series have overlapped and nurtured each other, I am seeking an opportunity to exhibit the series together, illustrating how the two mediums consulted each other. Although text is absent from the paintings, the dialog between the collages and the paintings is quite apparent.
Brad Terhune
December 2025
©Brad Terhune 2024
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