CECILY BROWN
Painting With Lush, Erotic Energy
British painter Cecily Brown (London,1969) is an artist that continues to amaze us. She became known in the 1990s, following an exhibition where she displayed abstract paintings of rabbits. Her expressive, lively, and erotically charged works are viewed from a strictly female perspective and influenced by popular contemporary culture and dominant artists like Peter Paul Rubens, Francisco de Goya, Edgar Degas, Joan Michell, and Francis Bacon. Of her work and style -mixing abstract and figurative painting- she has stated: “The place I’m interested in is where the mind goes when it’s trying to make up for what isn’t there.”
Brown was born in London and raised in its suburbs. She studied art at the Epsom School of Art, Morley College, and the Slade School of Art in London (where she received a BA in Fine Arts) before moving to New York City in 1994 and joining the Gagosian Gallery. In 1995 Brown presented the provocative ‘Four Letter Heaven’ at the Telluride Film Festival, and gained worldwide recognition. In an interview with Lari Pittman, she commented on the sexual nature of her work by stating: “I suppose you could say that the sexual is in every painting, whether there is an overt subject or not. The tension within the painting, whatever the subject, is the desired outcome. The sexy would be the girl’s lipstick smile or the shoe–the physical object from the three-dimensional world placed within the painting.” Her large canvases and choices of color, brush strokes, and materials all enhance the eroticism in her compositions. In 2000 her portrait in Vanity Fair stood out from the other artists. She got noticed for the sexy works, as well as how she presented herself.
In the 2010s, she parted ways with the Gagosian Gallery after 15 years to allow her paintings to be seen differently. It was a big move, and it changed her career path. Following the separation, she began to showcase smaller works she had been creating, shifting away from the large canvases for which she is most known. She refers to these small-scale paintings as more “neurotic,” as well as more challenging and unexpected. Brown’s first major monograph will be published this month (November 2020) by Phaidon Press.
For anyone looking to view Brown’s paintings, her most recent works (from 2019 onward) are on display now at New York’s Paula Cooper Gallery through December 12, 2020. The exhibition is available to visit in person (with reduced opening hours due to Covid-19). It can also be viewed virtually on the gallery’s website via a video that walks the viewer through the exhibit, giving them a feel of what it would be like to be in the gallery. Although Brown’s work is exceptionally unique, each painting is remarkably different from the others and intriguing in its way. As mentioned in the press release, Brown has stated, “One of the main things I would like my work to do is to reveal itself slowly, continuously, and for you to never feel that you’re really finished looking at something.” Some of the works featured in the exhibition are her stunning ‘Bedroom Paintings,’ produced during this past spring and summer and depicting erotic interior scenes.
The exhibition is virtually at this link: https://www.paulacoopergallery.com/exhibitions/cecily-brown-2020-10-15/vr-experience
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qjt5sONuPZQ
