Guy Hepner Gallery

Fanny Brodar Don't Worry Be Happy For Sale

Fanny Brodar
Fanny Brodar - Don't Worry Be Happy, 2022, Acrylic and oil stick on canvas

Don't Worry Be Happy, 2022

Acrylic and oil stick on canvas

24 x 24 inches

About this work

Fanny Brodar's "Don't Worry Be Happy" (2022) delivers an unapologetic burst of optimism through her signature fusion of bold typography and exuberant color. Rendered in acrylic and oil stick on a 24 x 24 inch canvas, the work transforms Bobby McFerrin's iconic 1988 lyric into a visual mantra for contemporary life, stripping the phrase down to its essential, universal message of choosing lightness over anxiety. Brodar's handling of materials creates a dynamic tension between control and spontaneity. The oil stick brings a tactile, almost graffiti-like quality to the letterforms, while layers of acrylic establish vibrant fields of color that pulse with energy. Her palette—characteristically saturated and joyful—refuses subtlety in favor of immediate emotional impact. The text dominates the composition with confident directness, yet the gestural marks and color interactions reveal a painterly sensibility that elevates the work beyond simple signage. This piece exemplifies Brodar's ongoing exploration of how familiar phrases accumulate new meaning when isolated and celebrated on canvas. By presenting these words as art objects, she invites viewers to pause and genuinely consider sentiments that might otherwise pass as cliché. The work functions simultaneously as decoration, affirmation, and gentle social commentary on our collective hunger for reassurance in uncertain times. Within Brodar's broader practice—which draws equally from food culture, travel memories, and the textures of everyday experience—"Don't Worry Be Happy" represents her most distilled approach to emotional communication: bright, accessible, and utterly sincere. The painting offers not irony but genuine invitation. This work is available for acquisition through Guy Hepner gallery in New York.

Price on Application

Edition & Provenance

Year
2022
Medium
Acrylic and oil stick on canvas

More from this series

About the Paintings Series

Fanny Brodar has emerged as one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary painting, crafting works that pulse with chromatic intensity and linguistic wit. Her canvases occupy a unique space in the current art landscape, merging the visual impact of color field painting with the conceptual punch of text-based art, all while maintaining an accessibility that invites viewers into her exuberant worldview. At Guy Hepner, we are proud to present a comprehensive collection of her paintings, works that capture the artist at the height of her creative powers and demonstrate why collectors across the globe have gravitated toward her singular aesthetic vision.

What strikes one immediately upon encountering a Fanny Brodar painting is the sheer confidence of her palette. She works with color not as mere decoration but as emotional architecture, building environments where saturated hues create psychological spaces that envelop the viewer. Her New York sensibility manifests in this boldness, a refusal to shy away from visual intensity that mirrors the city's own relentless energy. Yet within this vibrancy exists a sophistication of color relationships that reveals her deep understanding of how tones interact, complement, and occasionally challenge one another across the picture plane.

The integration of text into Brodar's compositions represents far more than graphic design sensibility applied to fine art. Her words function as both image and meaning, occupying dual roles that reward extended contemplation. In "I Love You," the declaration becomes monumental, transformed from everyday utterance into something approaching the sacred through scale and chromatic treatment. The phrase we speak casually, sometimes thoughtlessly, regains its power when Brodar renders it with such deliberate visual force. Similarly, "Optimist" takes a disposition, a way of moving through the world, and gives it physical presence. The painting becomes almost talismanic, a declaration of intent that the collector brings into their space as both aesthetic object and philosophical statement.

Brodar's exploration of food as subject matter connects her work to rich art historical traditions while remaining thoroughly contemporary. "Cake Monster" and "Live Love Eat" celebrate consumption not as mere sustenance but as pleasure, community, and identity. In an era when our relationships with food have become increasingly complicated, fraught with moral judgments and health anxieties, Brodar's paintings offer an antidote of pure joy. Her treatment of culinary subjects recalls the still life tradition while utterly subverting its conventions. Where Dutch masters rendered fruits and pastries with memento mori undertones, Brodar paints food as unambiguous celebration. "Sunkist" radiates with the warmth its name suggests, transforming a simple citrus into an emblem of vitality and sensory delight.

The artist's engagement with travel and place adds another dimension to her practice. These works capture the specific quality of light, mood, and experience that defines memorable journeys. Brodar possesses the ability to distill complex emotional experiences into visual shorthand that nonetheless contains multitudes. Her travel-inspired paintings function as portals, inviting viewers to access their own memories of discovery and displacement while simultaneously presenting Brodar's particular vision of these encounters.

"Secret Garden" reveals Brodar's more contemplative mode, suggesting interior spaces both literal and psychological. The work invites the viewer into a private realm, offering the intimacy that the title promises. This painting demonstrates her range, proving that her sensibility can accommodate quieter moments alongside the more exuberant declarations that characterize much of her output. "Blue" operates in similar territory, taking a single color and transforming it into emotional landscape. The painting acknowledges melancholy without wallowing, presenting the full spectrum of human feeling as worthy of artistic attention.

Works like "Today" and "No Bad Days" position Brodar within contemporary conversations about mindfulness and presence while avoiding the saccharine quality that often plagues such themes. Her paintings earn their optimism through formal rigor, the affirmations arriving not as empty platitudes but as hard-won positions supported by compositional intelligence and chromatic mastery. "Be Kind" extends this ethos into the social realm, offering a gentle imperative that feels increasingly urgent in our fractured moment. "My Stuff" meanwhile suggests the artist's engagement with accumulation, identity, and the objects through which we construct our sense of self.

"Mars Roller Derby" showcases Brodar's playful imagination at its most unbridled, combining references that span the cosmic and the subcultural. The painting demonstrates her willingness to embrace whimsy without sacrificing artistic seriousness, a balance that many artists attempt but few achieve with such apparent effortlessness.

Throughout her body of work, Fanny Brodar maintains a consistency of vision while avoiding repetition. Each painting exists as an individual statement while contributing to an ongoing project that celebrates everyday experience, elevates the mundane to the magnificent, and insists upon joy as a valid artistic subject. Her New York base informs her work's energy, its refusal to apologize for intensity, its embrace of diversity in reference and influence. Collectors respond to this authenticity, recognizing in Brodar an artist who paints from genuine conviction rather than market calculation.

These paintings possess the increasingly rare quality of being simultaneously intellectually engaging and emotionally immediate. They function in domestic spaces as sources of daily pleasure while rewarding the sustained attention that serious art demands. Brodar has created a visual language entirely her own, one that speaks to our moment while remaining timeless in its fundamental concerns with color, form, language, and feeling.

For acquisition inquiries regarding available works by Fanny Brodar, we invite collectors to contact Guy Hepner directly to discuss specific paintings, pricing, and shipping arrangements worldwide.

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Don't Worry Be Happy

About Fanny Brodar

Fanny Brodar has established herself as one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary American painting, creating works that transform everyday pleasures into vibrant declarations of joy. Based in New York, Brodar has developed a visual language that is immediately recognizable—bold, text-forward compositions that merge the accessibility of pop culture with the emotional directness of personal confession. Her paintings pulse with color and energy, inviting viewers into a world where a bagel

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