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October 3, 2013

Spotlight: Cecily Brown


©Cecily Brown. Courtesy of the artist and Gagosian Gallery. Photography by Rob McKeever

Editors' Notes

Cecily Brown, Luck Just Kissed You Hello, 2013

Oil on Linen

67 x 65 inches


©Cecily Brown. Courtesy of the artist and Gagosian Gallery. Photography by Rob McKeever

Editors' Notes

Cecily Brown, Untitled, 2013

Oil on Linen

77 x 165 inches


©Cecily Brown. Courtesy of the artist and Gagosian Gallery. Photography by Rob McKeever

Editors' Notes

Cecily Brown, Untitled (The Beautiful and Damned), 2013

Oil on Linen

109 x 171 inches

“Edgar Degas’ Young Spartans Exercising has long been an inspiration for Cecily,” says Deborah McLeod of the Gagosian Gallery in Beverly Hills where London-born painter Cecily Brown has mounted her first solo show in 10 years. The New York-based artist, whose eponymous exhibition runs through October 12, also has work in the permanent collections of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and London’s Tate gallery. Brown says she was particularly thinking of the light in L.A. as she selected colors for the large canvases depicting nude ensembles. “The paintings are lighter and brighter with acid yellows and a cloying and sometimes vulgar palette,” Brown says. The canvases are the largest works Brown has created in some time, and the fragmented figures, faces, and dashes of color convey the idea of men or women in action.

Brown’s new paintings—the result of over two years of work—can best be described as a meeting between abstraction and figurative art. In addition to the Degas connection, McLeod also likens the works to intricate Gustav Klimt compositions. “Brown’s work is tumbling with energy and imagery in the foreground and background. Some of the paintings are like bird’s nests and you search them for the subjects,” she says. McLeod points out the faces visible in crowded nude ensembles as examples of what she calls “Brown’s new foray into the figurative area.” Brown, who works on all of the paintings at the same time, says she was sometimes uneasy with how defined the figures were becoming and would let the work sit for a while. “Just as a figure is getting clearer, I get really abstract with another painting, as if one is a reaction to another,” she says. “I try to have the figure and not lose it, I never want to be saying this is the way it is; this is the truth.” To that end, many of the works in the show also carry the Untitled moniker.

Brown keeps puzzles in her N.Y. art studio, and, not surprisingly, her favorite is a version of Hieronymus Bosch’s triptych, The Garden of Earthly Delights. Another influence on her new work is the photograph depicting a host of nude women on Jimi Hendrix’s 1968 album, Electric Ladyland, a record she says she loved as a teenager. Indeed, though there are some paintings of men in the show, many of the images depict females. “I hadn’t wanted to paint nude women because I thought there were so many of them already and they’re always so passive,” says Brown. But, to her, depicting crowds of active women seemed different. “Giacometti’s females are always standing still,” she says, referring to the Swiss sculptor’s elongated bronze figures, “And the men are always moving.”

Brown says action—tension and movement in particular—is the subject of all of her work. “It wasn’t that I didn’t want strong images of men, but I didn’t want to paint them stronger than women,” she says. Brown also notes that there’s a lack of female artists’ work that celebrates the male body. “One’s more inclined to accept images of women sitting naked,” she says, adding, “There are so many subjects you can’t do anymore. You don’t find boys sitting around bathing, for example.”

By Elizabeth Varnell

 

Pictured: Cecily Brown
Photo by James Loveday Vert/ Courtesy of Gagosian Gallery

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