John Brooks

John Brooks (b. 1978, Louisville, Kentucky) is a queer artist and writer whose practice explores the liminal spaces of longing, history, and intimacy. Rooted in both observation and mythology, his drawings and paintings map the intersections between the body, landscape, and memory. In So Fierce a Dancing, a one-day solo exhibition in Basel presented by Sabbatikal at Vero’s Kunst & Rahmen, Brooks unveils a new suite of drawings created during his time walking along the river Rhine, as well as other bodies of water. These works, made onsite and from the residue of those moments, gather together the sensual, the contemplative, and the historical in equal measure.

The title of the show, borrowed from Hermann Hesse’s poem A Swarm of Gnats, gestures toward movement and disappearance, rhythm and dissolution. In Brooks’ hands, the act of drawing becomes both dance and documentation, a fierce and tender encounter with time.

“I’m trying to mark something that isn’t just seen, but felt. Not a likeness, but a trace of presence, of yearning, of the way queer time lingers and loops.”

Brooks’ process is deeply tied to place. Whether walking the riverbanks in Basel or sketching from intimate memory in his Los Angeles studio, he works from a space of embodied attention. The figures in his drawings often emerge from reference photographs and take on emotional archetypes - phantoms of desire, tenderness, or loss. His line is gestural yet precise, often echoing the physicality of movement: a shoulder turning, a hand suspended, a glance half-retreated.

In Basel, his proximity to the Rhine became both site and collaborator. His drawings from this period ripple with watery edges and contemplative silences, bringing together past and present, myth and modernity.

Presented for one day only by Sabbatikal at Vero’s Kunst & Rahmen in Basel, So Fierce a Dancing showcases a new suite of works by Louisville-based artist John Brooks. The drawings, rendered entirely in colored pencil, chart encounters along the Rhine through a vivid neon palette and emotionally charged mark-making. The series, titled Helvetica, oscillates between figuration and abstraction: portraits, bathers, and waterscapes dissolve into pulsating, radiant lines that mirror the flicker of memory.

At the heart of So Fierce a Dancing is a meditation on queer time and tenderness. Brooks' compositions carry the intimacy of a diary - sunburnt backs, glimmering water, fragments of bodies at rest and play - yet resist narrative closure. What appears simple becomes complex through repetition, shadow, or dissolution. These are not mere representations, but traces: a choreography of feeling, presence, and reverie made visible in colored wax and line.

“There’s something radical about tenderness when it refuses to be explained away. That’s the space I’m after,” Brooks writes.

The series plays with scale and pace - some images unfold languidly, like a warm afternoon, while others burn with electric immediacy. Across all of them is a sense of myth building from the everyday. Figures move through water, pause mid-glance, or vanish altogether, held briefly in a language both familiar and newly invented.

Following So Fierce a Dancing, John Brooks continues developing his ongoing drawing series and is currently working on a new body of paintings that engage with queer history, literature, and landscape. His recent solo exhibitions include shows at Quappi Projects (Louisville, KY), Skylab Gallery (Columbus, OH), and Sebastian Gladstone Gallery (Los Angeles, CA). Brooks’ writing has been published in numerous literary journals, and his background in poetry continues to inform his visual language.

He is the recipient of awards from the Great Meadows Foundation and the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation, and he holds an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

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