A Mountain of My Own

Brian Scott Cambell

March 6 - April 12, 2026

Left Field is pleased to present A Mountain of My Own, a solo exhibition of new paintings by Brian Scott Campbell. This exhibition is Campbell’s second presentation with the gallery and brings together a group of recent works that extend his ongoing investigation into the symbolic and psychological dimensions of landscape.

In A Mountain of My Own, the mountain emerges as both subject and proposition: a site of solitude and agency. Long embedded in the history of painting as a symbol of transcendence and the sublime, the mountain here becomes intimate, vulnerable, and provisional—less a monument than a companion. Campbell approaches the motif as a site of repetition and insistence, an object revisited in search of something subtly altered over time. The mountains that appear are not fixed geographic forms but mutable structures shaped by memory, desire, and invention.

Across these new canvases, landscape and abstract space interpenetrate. Landscape is reduced to interlocking blocks of color that fit together like a jigsaw, their edges at times unruly or fuzzy. Silhouetted peaks hover against gauzy grounds of thinly layered paint; horizons double as thresholds; building-block shapes and “clunky” slabs of cloud surface within expanses of sky. The works hold in tension graphic clarity and a hazy, unstable surface. The mountain appears as a blemish or protrusion on otherwise flattened bands and stripes of color, interrupting the composition and asserting its presence within the picture plane. In several paintings, it reads almost as a figure—a blunt, sometimes clumsy, upright form occupying the pictorial field with bodily weight.

Campbell’s process is one of accumulation and revision. Layers of paint are built up, scraped back, and reconfigured, allowing earlier decisions to remain partially visible. This cyclical approach reinforces the exhibition’s central tension between permanence and impermanence: the mountain as an emblem of endurance set against the fluid, contingent nature of perception. The surfaces carry evidence of time and touch, foregrounding painting as a record of lived experience rather than a mere window onto the world.

A Mountain of My Own proposes a view of the external world that is absorbed, remembered, and reconstituted as an extension of lived experience. The title suggests both independence and impossibility: to claim a mountain as one’s own is to acknowledge the tension between autonomy and entanglement, between the desire to locate a stable vantage point and the recognition that landscape, like identity, is continually reshaped through perception and return

Biography

Brian Scott Campbell (b. 1983, Columbus, OH) received a BFA from the Columbus College of Art and Design, OH, and an MFA from the Mason Gross School of the Arts, Rutgers University, NJ.

Campbell has exhibited widely, including solo exhibitions at Stene Projects, Stockholm; Asya Geisberg Gallery, New York; Dutton, New York; and Galleria Richter, Rome. Group exhibitions include Fredericks & Freiser, New York; David Shelton Gallery, Houston; Ruttkowski;68, Munich; Johansson Projects, San Francisco; and NADA New York, Untitled Miami Beach, and ART021 Beijing art fairs, among others.

Awards and residencies include the Joan Mitchell Foundation Scholarship Fund at the Atlantic Center for the Arts; the Macedonian Institute Residency; a McColl Center for Visual Art Full Fellowship; a Vermont Studio Center Fellowship; and the Artist in the Marketplace Program at the Bronx Museum of the Arts, New York. Campbell’s work has been featured in Modern Painters / Blouin ArtInfo, The Huffington Post, Hyperallergic, Glasstire, Juliet, i-D Magazine / Vice, Art Viewer, and others.

Campbell’s work is included in the permanent collections of Stanford University and Fondazione Acqua Milano. He lives in Denton, Texas, and is an Associate Professor of Drawing and Painting at the College of Visual Arts and Design at the University of North Texas.