where are you from?

Brian Paeper

december 6, 2025 - january 31, 2026

Los Angeles, CA — CMAY Gallery is pleased to present Where Are You From? - the first exhibition at the gallery by  Los Angeles–based artist Brian Paeper.

In this new body of work, Paeper constructs meticulously crafted collages using original Fortune magazines from the 1930s, 1940s and 1950’s. The vintage gravure printing—rich blacks, subtle halftone texture, multi-color lithography and the graphic language of early industrial modernism—infuses each work with the patina of another era. Paeper isolates, cuts, and recombines imagery with a precision that dissolves the visual seams of collage; rather than appearing assembled, the compositions unfold like cohesive, uncanny visions. His images suggest narratives that feel both familiar and unplaceable—like fragments of forgotten memory or 
evidence from an alternate past.

Paeper was born in Amsterdam and emigrated with his parents to Los Angeles during high school. He studied English Literature at Bennington College in Vermont, before returning to Europe for several years, and did not begin making art until his late twenties. In 1992, CMAY Gallery curator Carl Berg gave Paeper his first exhibition in Los Angeles at LACA Gallery (Los Angeles Contemporary Art) featuring abstract oil paintings, followed by a second solo exhibition when the gallery became LASCA (Los Angeles Seoul Contemporary Art) in 1996. During this period Paeper also exhibited extensively in Switzerland and later in Seoul, South Korea in 1995 at the Park Rye Sook Gallery.

After a flurry of exhibitions in the 1990s, Paeper stepped away from visual art to open the used bookstore Alias Books on Sawtelle Boulevard in West Los Angeles, while his brother continues to operate Alias Books East in Atwater Village. Surrounded by printed matter, Paeper gradually rediscovered his interest in visual image-making. Estate-purchased vintage magazines—particularly their obsolete visual language and physical tactility—became the foundation of his current practice.

Entirely self-taught, Paeper embraces the freedom of working outside academic convention. Without allegiance to formal rules of art-making, he constructs a visual realm entirely on his own terms—where history, memory, and imagination collapse into mysterious new realities.