Contributed by Sharon Butler / This month, the Two Coats of Paint Residency Program welcomes Bryce Speed, a painter and professor at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa. In his intriguing abstractions from 2023–24, Bryce embedded architectural structures but refrained from fully imparting the specificity required to identify a particular situation or place. Instead, he played with the position of shapes within the picture plane to create subtle relationships and illusions of space. In a 2015 interview, he expressed admiration for the contemporary Australian artist Toba Kehdoori in part because he “uses imagery of banal interior scenes to convey a sense of open and empty space that seeks contemplation.” Bryce himself seems to achieve the paradox that description suggests: spatially circumscribed paintings that still imply indefinite expansion.
In “The Narrow Trail Merges with a Wider Path,” a solo exhibition at Cole Pratt Gallery in New Orleans on view through May 31, he has introduced hand-drawn line fragments and looser brushwork. As a result, the new work veers away from the earlier architectural approach towards a more organic landscape sensibility. In Bryce’s lexicon, the architectural structures represent stability, the colored boxes and brushier elements flux. In Two Coats of Paint, Jonathan Stevenson called him “a formidably freewheeling abstract painter, at once eclectic and original.” Indeed. Bryce’s canvases bear some broad similarity to those of, say, early Tomma Abts, but the line is much looser and the mindset more improvisational.
Bryce is “interested in the capacity of the spaces we live in to be a receptacle for our identities.” He thinks of his images as pictographs operating as a personal syntax, developed through repetition and shaped by time. A dialogue unfolds through form, space, color, and rhythm. Flowing organic lines and geometric shapes branch out in unpredictable paths. Forms cluster, scatter, overlap, or intersect, creating a whimsical sense of movement. Geometric but unfussy, his work straddles the representational and the abstract, drawing and painting, and quietly absorbs attributes of early twentieth-century pioneers – Matisse’s inside-outside fluidity, Gego’s delicate line, the reductive but dynamic compositions of Tomás Maldonado, and Alfredo Hlito – refracted, of course, through Bryce’s own lens. He himself has characterized his paintings as formally “atmospheric and architectural,” striking an apt chord of imaginative flight deftly controlled.
Biography: Bryce Speed (b. 1978, Hattiesburg, MS), received his B.F.A. from the University of Mississippi and his M.F.A. from the University of Alabama, followed by a residency at the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts. Bryce has had solo shows and exhibited widely in the United States and the United Kingdom. His work has appeared in HERE Art Center (NYC), PS122 Gallery (NYC), the Royal Scottish Academy (Edinburgh), the Warbling Collective (London), and Zeitgeist Gallery (Nashville). His work has also been featured in New American Paintings. He is represented by The George Gallery (Charleston) and Cole Pratt Gallery (New Orleans). He is Associate Professor of Painting at the University of Alabama.
Current exhibition: “Bryce Speed: The Narrow Trail Merges with a Wider Path,” Cole Pratt Gallery, 3800 Magazine Street, New Orleans, LA. Through May 31, 2025.
Bryce Speed, Two Coats of Paint Artist Residency, May 18–23, 2025
Open Studio: Thursday, May 22, 3–6 pm. Listen to Bryce’s studio playlist here.
Two Coats of Paint
22-19 41st Avenue, 6th Floor, Studio #10
Long Island City, NY
For more information, or to arrange a studio visit, please contact:
STAFF@twocoatsofpaint.com. Please put BRYCE in the subject line.
