About Brooke Harker

Brooke Harker is a contemporary artist based in Los Angeles, California. Her lively paintings of cities and coastal scenes are characterized by energetic brush strokes in ink and thick oil paint applied with palette knives. These vibrant depictions of daily life capture a sense of motion and highlight moments of synchronicity.

Harker calls herself a historian of the ordinary. Her paintings are a collaboration with all of the people who've contributed to a place over time: architects, engineers, and pedestrians whose colorful fashion landed in view at the perfect moment. All of their individual actions brought together one moment, fated to be captured on canvas.

Harker's paintings live in collections all over the world, including with the Prince of Morocco in the Royal Palace in Rabat and as part of The Chase Center Art Collection in San Francisco, home to the Golden State Warriors. Her triptych of the famous Sensoji Temple in Tokyo is part of the permanent cultural heritage collection of The U.S. Embassy Tokyo, Japan in collaboration with the U.S. Department of State's Office of Art in Embassies. Her artworks to reside in dining rooms, living spaces, bedrooms, offices and stairwells around the world with the opportunity to be part of collector's every day lives, including in the private collections of numerous Hollywood creatives.

Harker's next solo exhibition Lazio Dreaming, curated by Alfio Borghese, will open in Rome in 2027, and feature paintings from several summer residencies in Italy. These paintings track the ambition to celebrate and record the towns of the Lazio region of Italy, a pursuit that has been both a dream and many adventures.

Recent solo exhibitions Timescapes in 2025 and Night & Day in 2023, both showed at Gabba Gallery in Los Angeles and featured global cityscapes.

In 2022, Harker's paintings debuted at the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum and during the 2021 Olympics at The Chiba City Museum of Art in Japan. Her artworks received gold awards as part of the 20th Japan International Art Exchange. Curators, Katsu Shimmin and Julienne Johnson also placed Harker's art in The National Art Center of Tokyo in 2019, where it received an Award of Excellence.

Fascinated by other cultures and languages since childhood, Harker has lived abroad and participated in projects and residencies throughout Europe and Asia.

From 2015-2019 Harker's solo exhibition, An Eclectic Perspective, painted on a farm in Italy toured Italian galleries in Rome, Genoa and Frosinone. Select paintings participated in numerous group exhibitions and Bienales curated by Borghese in Italy and California until 2023. The flagship of these exhibitions, California Dreaming: An International Portrait of Southern California (juried by art critic Peter Frank & museum directors Daniel Foster and Drew Oberjuerg) toured to Palazzo della Provincia di Frosinone, Italy, and in California to the Oceanside Museum of Art and the Riverside Museum of Art from 2014-

Harker exhibits in various galleries in Los Angeles and has been represented by Lu Martin Galleries in Laguna Beach, CA since 2014.

She continues to travel for inspiration, yet always returns home to Los Angeles to paint in an outdoor studio in the California sunshine.

Selected recent exhibits: Gabba Gallery, LA, Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum, The Chiba City Museum of Art, The National Art Center, Tokyo, Japan, The Chase Center, San Francisco, CA, Michael Hayden Art, LA, Castelli Art Space, LA, Palazzo del Comune, Boville Erica, Italy, Al Barsha, Dubai, United Arab Emirates, Area Contesa Arte, Rome, Italy, Gloria Delson Contemporary Arts, LA, Gallery 825, Los Angeles, Lu Martin Galleries, Laguna Beach, CA, Satura Art Gallery, Genoa, Italy, Villa Comunale di Frosinone, Italy, Riverside Museum of Art in Riverside CA, Fann-A-Porter Gallery in Dubai, Oceanside Museum of Art in Oceanside CA, Palazzo della Provincia di Frosinone, Italy,

Selected Press & Recognition: Art Report Today, Shoutout LA, Artillery Magazine, American Art Collector, Art in America, ChicStyle, Italy, ExtraTV, Italy, The Huffington Post, The Hollywood Times, The Malibu Times, La Provincia- (Frosinone, Italy), le3.it, The Santa Monica Mirror, Splash Magazines, The Examiner, Topanga Messenger, Santa Monica Daily Press, Westside Today, The Los Angeles Post, Dongguan Informer (China), and cited in More Magazine & Felix Magazine, Buzzfeed, Season 8 of Hell’s Kitchen on FOX, & nominated in 2013 by the Field Deputy of CA State Senator Alex Padilla for Excellence in the Arts.

The paintings I create are about connections between people. Within the hustle of any city or relaxing coastal scene there is a silent cooperation between people, whether to negotiate their paths on a sidewalk or in the selection of where to place umbrellas in the sand. I’m fascinated by the idea that a moment exists only once and will never occur again. It amazes me how the lives of many people throughout history contribute to the current moment and a person’s minor choices have the ability to impact infinite people throughout time. In some ways, my paintings are time capsules, and I’m a historian of the ordinary.

It becomes a bit of a hunt for me when taking photos or sketching live on location to find moments of unknowing collaboration between strangers. I track the stride of pedestrians, the flow of traffic and the position of the sun in illuminating these interactions. This fascination with synchronicity reflects in the compositions I choose. I sort for pops of color that relate to each other in the same moment. When a pedestrian’s pants match a nearby taxi or a bus coordinates with the traffic light it brightens my day. These seemingly insignificant observations ignite a sense of wonder about the way everything in life fits together. As most people don’t want to hear how excited I am to see a grocery bag match a street sign, I let the joy fuel my art.

As I associate places and people with color, the drippy acrylic backgrounds represent the energy of a place. The ink strokes, whether fluid or defined, mirror the structured world we live in and are a place to tame the wanderings of the mind. The pure colors in thick oil paint texture applied with knives express a desire to feel a sense of flow in life. The stories of many people I’ve met and learned from along the way are layered into the process of creating these scenes. Painting allows me to share my life visibly and are private journal entries at the same time. The lessons I learn in life embed in the paint and help transform my perspective and experiences. I believe that as each person connects to themselves and heals, there is a potential for the thread of our impact to open this world up to more compassion, understanding and love.

About

Artist Statement