Painted in gloopy brown brushstrokes on a cool cerulean panel and framed in a wabi-sabi wooden border, the words Have A NiCE DAY—with an emphatic "A" and "E" and a leaning "Y"—mark the earliest known painting of artist Brian DeGraw, made at the age of five..

Set against the backdrop of the late 1970s, this primal gesture echoes a childhood saturated in color and texture: a Rothko exhibition poster pinned in a suburban basement, the striped banana seat of a Huffy Desperado, small fingers sketching into the foggy rear window of a Ford station wagon, the brown, orange and yellow bands of the Caldor rainbow. This is fertile terrain DeGraw hypnagogically mines—an excavation of memory, instinct, and the raw delight of unselfconscious creation.

In his newest series of large-scale oil paintings, DeGraw reclaims traces of that early impulse. He champions spontaneity and unconscious expression as foundational to his process, drawing a direct line between artistic freedom and the innocence of first marks. Each canvas becomes a layered conversation—graphic precision clashing with loose, improvisational sweeps, embracing the dual forces of intention and instinct that arise in the navigation of human existence.

A serpentine line writhes across the works, a recurring motif that cuts through surface and structure alike. It functions as both destroyer and revealer—its path of erasure exposing buried layers, untouched moments of pure, liberated gesture. The visual rhythm recalls the volatile melodies of free jazz: ecstatic bursts, unexpected turns, and sudden descents into meditative stillness.

DeGraw’s exhibition, The Leaning Y, channels memory, rhythm, and movement to unearth nascent creative roots, allowing them to organically evolve into refined acts of invention.

Based in New York City, Brian DeGraw is a self-taught multidisciplinary artist who is influenced by his engagement with experimental music as a founding member of the group Gang Gang Dance. DeGraw’s work has been exhibited and performed internationally at prominent institutions including the Museum of Modern Art (NY), Whitney Museum of American Art (in the 2008 Whitney Biennial), The Jewish Museum (NY), The Institute of Contemporary Art (LDN), The Mori Art Museum (Tokyo), Kunsthalle Wien (Vienna), The Broad Museum (LA) and Macro Museum (Rome). He has held solo and group exhibitions in galleries including but not limited to James Fuentes (NY/LA), Gavin Brown Enterprise (NY), Pace Gallery (NY), Tanya Leighton (Berlin), HdM Gallery (Shanghai), Loyal Gallery (Malmo), White Columns (NY), Wish-Less (Tokyo), American Fine Arts (NY) and Galerie Du Jour (Paris). His work is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, Zabludowicz Collection, Dakis Joannou Collection, Ragnarock Museum, and Agnes B Collection. The work has been featured in the New York Times, Frieze, and Interview.