Michael Brunswick & Abdul Mazid

Ace Tiger Gallery is pleased to present 23.44°, an exhibition of new paintings by Abdul Mazid and Michael Brunswick.

The exhibition takes its title from the 23.44-degree tilt of the Earth’s axis, the nearly imperceptible deviation that governs the changing seasons, the duration of daylight each day, and the cyclical rhythms through which life organizes itself. Though largely invisible, this subtle inclination produces profound effects, shaping environmental conditions across the planet while reminding us that transformation often emerges from forces operating beyond direct observation.

Working through distinct but complementary approaches to abstraction, Brunswick and Mazid create paintings that are less composed than discovered. Their practices embrace processes of accumulation, displacement, emergence, and adaptation, allowing material behavior to play an active role in the formation of each work. Rather than imposing fixed images, both artists establish conditions through which form can evolve, unfold, and reveal itself over time.

Brunswick’s continuing growth as a performance artist incorporates his 20 years as a working artist and his long journey through the wilderness of painting. Mazid’s paintings emerge through cycles of accumulation and excavation, where successive layers are built up, flooded, peeled back, sanded, and partially removed. The resulting surfaces evoke aerial terrains, cellular structures, animal skins, geological formations, and cosmological space, existing simultaneously as landscape, image, and object.

Throughout the exhibition, painting functions not as a static image but as a record of dynamic relationships between intention and possibility, order and entropy, agency and surrender. Like the planetary tilt from which the exhibition takes its name, the forces shaping these works often remain unseen. Their presence is registered indirectly—through shifts in surface, the accumulation of time, and the emergence of forms that appear at once inevitable and unknowable.