Cecily Brown. Absolutely Fabulous, British Born Painter
Can’t believe I hadn’t heard of Cecily Brown until recently, she is quite an amazing painter. Large, luscious brush strokes invigorate the canvas with her signature style of blending abstraction with the figure.
She was born in London in 1969. And it was in London where she studied and received her Bachelors in Fine Arts from the Slade School of Art in 1993. Shortly after moving to the U.S., she had her first solo exhibition in New York at Deitch Projects in 1997 and a second in 1998, both were met with critical and commercial success.
She has a great respect for art history and her works reveal her reverence and high regard for artists such as Francisco de Goya, Nicolas Poussin, Willem de Kooning, and Joan Mitchell while incorporating into her works her distinct female view point.
From: Gagosian Gallery
Study for Sam Mere 2, 2008 Oil on linen, 85 x 89 inches
Expanding the tradition of abstract expressionism, she draws her influences from painters such as Willem de Kooning. Her paintings also recall the works of Philip Guston and the Bay Area Figurative School of the 1950s and 1960s. Brown often titles her paintings after classic Hollywood films, such as The Pyjama Game, The bedtime story and The Fugitive Kind.
Sexuality and attraction are important themes in her work, which she explores through semi-figurative and abstract means. Her paintings are in the permanent collections of several important museums and institutions including the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, in Buffalo, New York and the Des Moines Art Center, in Des Moines, Iowa (in 2006 the Des Moines Art Center organized Brown’s first one-person museum exhibition in the U.S. – an exhibition that later travelled to the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston as well). Wikipedia.
From: artnet : Saatchi Gallery
“Cottage No.3,” 1991 Oil on canvas, h: 36.2 x w: 31.1 in
Brown became famous for restoring a certain sensuality to painting. Her early works, such as those in ‘The Skin Game’, her first show at the Gagosian, were erotic, both in that they depicted sexual acts and in the way the consistency of the paint evoked such human textures.
‘I think when I was doing a lot of sexual paintings,’ she remembers, ‘what I wanted – in a way that I think now is too literal – was for the paint to embody the same sensations that bodies would. Oil paint very easily suggests bodily fluids and flesh.’
But her images were too broken down to be pornographic. Her more recent Black Paintings, for example, clearly contain a naked figure, but they are more like hallucinations than depictions. ‘I’ve been trying to get away from always having couples and sex,’ she says. Ideally, she would like to produce an oeuvre that is not too coherent; though she thinks every painter has a mark that is instinctive, ‘like the sound of your voice’, she tries to push herself so that no one can say she paints a certain way.
Excerpted from The Observer, Sunday, 12 June 2005 article by Gaby Wood
From: artnet and Robert Miller Gallery
“Untitled,” 1997 Oil on unprimed linen h: 73 x w: 81 in
To this end, Brown works on up to 20 paintings at once. When I visit the studio, two ‘big messy things’, as she calls her abstract paintings, are facing each other. On another wall, there are works in progress she refers to as ‘office paintings’ – red interiors, like furious Vuillards, that wrong-foot you as you look. By the door is an almost-monochrome oil based on a Victorian picture puzzle – little girls whose forms make up a skull – which is smeared and scrambled until it is unrecognisable except as a gut-felt memento mori.
All of Brown’s paintings are unresolvable puzzles of some kind. Her marks can be gnarled and vicious, ghostly or gloomy, or they can be elegiac, arrestingly sweet, precise. ‘I’ve always wanted to have a lot of different ways of saying something, maybe sometimes to the detriment of the paintings,’ Brown says, ‘so that you might have a veil of paint that suggests some very delicate skin, but then I’ll want something very meaty and clogged next to it.’ When painter John Currin called Brown’s paintings ‘promiscuous’, he didn’t just mean they were about sex; he meant they could exist in all these worlds, flitting between possibilities. Excerpted from The Observer, Sunday, 12 June 2005 article by Gaby Wood
Cecily Brown is one of a group of young English artists currently making a splash on the international art scene. Born in London in 1970, she dropped out of high school at the age of 16 to study art, eventually graduating from the Slade School of Art in London in 1993. The following year she moved to Manhattan where she lives and works today.
Brown’s paintings first came to the attention of the New York art world when she exhibited what she called her “bunny gang rape” paintings in a Manhattan gallery in 1997. Notable collectors including, Charles Saatchi and Agnes Gund, were quick to acquire these works and Brown’s career was launched.
This painting is from a later series in which fragmented body parts have been totally consumed by the painterly surface. These paintings have been described by art critic Roberta Smith as “… an attempt to juice up and feminize the shop worn vocabulary of abstract expressionism.” The titles that Brown chooses are often taken from Hollywood movies. In this case, the title is taken from the 1950 classic, Father of the Bride. References to brides, the sexually-charged notion of a new marriage, and the suggestions of body parts combine to evoke layers of meaning in this exuberantly painted gestural abstraction. As the artist describes it: “I’m trying to be in a space between abstraction and figuration.” – Jennifer Bayles, Educator for Special Projects
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