Tools As Art: The Hechinger Collection

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Charlie Brouwer, He Always Carried His Ladder to the Job, 1989
painted wood
96 x 120 x 48 in.

Charlie Brouwer was born in Holland, Michigan, in 1946. He received an M.A. in painting in 1980 and an M.F.A. in sculpture in 1984, both from Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo. Brouwer has taught high school in Australia and in the United States and has taught art at Radford University, Radford, Virginia, since 1987. He has shown at galleries and art centers throughout the United States and in Hungary and Poland. His work has been included in exhibitions at the Art Museum of the Americas Organization of American States, Washington, D.C., and the Charles A. Wustum Museum of Fine Arts, Racine, Wisconsin. His work is in the McDonalds' Corporation Collection, the UpJohn Corporation Collection, the Notoro Collection of International Contemporary Art, Poland, and the International Outdoor Wood Sculpture Park, Nagyatad, Hungary. Brouwer employs a visual vocabulary of natural and artificial objects, including tools, as metaphors to express larger spiritual truths. With his use of tools imagery and his preference for raw lumber as a medium, Brouwer alludes to the perception that "in American, anyway, every man is a handyman." That simple, honest quality resulting from the simplicity of his medium together with his rough-hewn, almost childlike style, lend his work an accessibility that gives way to deeper meanings.