Artist: Cecily Brown

Cecily Brown

Cecily Brown was born in London in 1969. she dropped out of high school at the age of 16 to study art, She studied and received her degree, BA in Fine Arts from Slade Scholl of art in London between the years 1989-93.

She also studied drawing rawing and printmaking classes at Morley College in London 1987-89 and BTEC Diploma in Art and Design from Epsom School of Art, Surrey, England (1985-87).

The following year she moved to Manhattan where she lives and works today.
Shortly after moving to the U.S, Brown had her first solo exhibition in New York at Deitch Projects in 1997 and a second in 1998. Her paintings first came to the attention when 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,

When David Sylvester and his friend Francis Bacon took Cecily Brown to exhibitions as a girl, she had no idea the art critic was actually her father( David Sylvester, one of Britain's leading art critics ). Now one of the most collectable painters in the world, she is quick to acknowledge the influence of both.

Cecily Brown’s luscious paintings combine figuration and abstraction. Expanding the tradition of expressionism, she draws her influences from painters such as Francis Bacon and Willem de Kooning to put a feminine twist on a male dominated art history.
She has since established herself as one of the key figures in the strong resurgence of painting at the end of the nineties. Brown revels in the freedom she has forged as a young female painter, her work liberates and celebrates the sacred cows of old master figure painting.
Cecily Brown uses paint with an unusual sensuality, her creamy layers and rapturous colours offer sexually charged surfaces in which suggestions of figures emerge. Her paintings are marked by a carnal physicality, in which bodies are fragmented, distorted, and fetishised, and paint becomes a malleable and voluptuous substitute for flesh itself.
Brown’s tones and textures range from teasing frivolity, to the sordid and sweltry. Her work offers a distinctively womanly seduction, imparted with a stylised innocence of a bygone era, where illicit romance and passion are discretely veiled within cultivated codes of social etiquette and decadent fashion.

Cecily Brown’s interest in figuration stems from the narcissistic relation between viewer and depicted body. Attraction through identification plays a central theme in Brown’s work. Her paint insinuates the sensation of physical experience, alluding to bodies in motion.

Her vague characters, both delineated and implied, become surrogates for viewers’ projection. Brown’s gestural abstractions transform as expanded psychological fields. Her paint - spattered, smeared, groped, and battered -- configures in promiscuous spectres; suggestively explicit, her fractured compositions replicate the subconscious formulations of drive and desire.

Brown paints directly onto the canvas without the use of preparatory drawings, giving a sensual texture to her work. Swirling brush strokes in 'Overbite' show both figurative and abstract rabbits caught in a bacchanalian landscape. The overlay of paint on paint gives a feeling that the composition is developing. This makes the surface of the canvas fragile so the gallery actively encourages you to leave your baggage (in lockers) at the door. This is a great metaphor as psychologically you can leave your preconceived ideas about sex outside the exhibition, be open to Brown's depiction and go where that takes you.

Through painting, Cecily Brown conveys both somatic and intellectual eroticism as a metaphysical experience. The corporeal indulgence of her medium reverberates as spiritual enlightenment; this climactic elation is replicated through the artist’s physically intensive process. Each canvas is permeated with an ethereal light, giving both a sense of airy daydream and piercing ecstasy. Cecily Brown’s paintings possess a transfixing aura where painterly reverence and female sexuality reside as destined.
Brown's work has attracted the attention of collectors including Elton John and Michael Ovitz.
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 traveled to the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston as well).

Her winter 2000 exhibition at Gagosian Gallery, New York (SoHo) was her first with the gallery. In 2001 Brown had an exhibition at Contemporary Fine Art in Berlin and then in 2003 she had her first Los Angeles show at Gagosian Gallery in Beverly Hills. Since then she has had solo exhibitions at such prestigious institutions as the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; the MACRO, Rome; the Museo Reina Sofia, Madrid; Museum of Fine Art, Boston, MA; Kunsthalle Mannheim, Germany; Des Moines Art Center, IA and Modern Art Oxford, England. The artist has also participated in group exhibitions at the Galleria, Arco, Turin, the Saatchi Collection, London, the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York

She has had solo shows in the Gagosian and Deitch Projects galleries in New York, and in the Victoria Miro and Eagle galleries in London. Brown has also been included in numerous group shows, including "Greater New York"


Excerpts from an interview with Odili Donald Odita in Flash Art, Nov-Dec 2000

Cecily Brown
"Figures are the only thing that I've ever painted. I'm interested in the human need or desire to represent itself. I'm fascinated with human narcissism and obsessions with bodies."

"...I love the trick of painting. You can have the movement within the still thing, but it is completely fixed. And that illusion is constantly exciting."

ODO: It the unanswerable... the insatiable... who, or what are we?

"CB: Yeah, and not to sound too cheesy, but making art is, in a way, a metaphor for that. It's asking questions more than coming up with any answers. In a way that's why they can be read in so many different ways."

ODO: Do you paint with an acknowledgement of Western painting as a reflection of the Caucasian male gaze, or are you conscious of the way you paint your forms as Cecily Brown, the woman?

"CB: I'm afraid this might not be the politically correct answer, but I think that my love of painting has always come before any critique of the fact that it's racist, or sexist. If someone thinks De Kooning is a misogynist that's fair enough. His feelings about his subject are less important to me than whether it works as a striking image, or if it's brilliantly done. It happens that it mostly has been done by men, but that's changing. I must admit, not until I started showing had I heard people say it was nice to see this being done by a woman. I was kind of like, 'duh,' I'm just painting. I heard these responses when I first exhibited those paintings at Deitch Projects. It is kind of a sad thing that we can't necessarily look to a woman artist from the past and say I want to paint like her. I grew up saying I want to paint like Caravaggio or Goya. But, my attitude is that male and female aren't so different, and of course, I can say that. It's a wonderful time to be a woman. Women at the end of the 21st century won't even question their heroes in that way."

SELECTED SOLO EXHIBITIONS

2006 Des Moines Art Center, Iowa.
2005 Paintings, Kunsthalle Mannheim, Mannheim.
Paintings, Modern Art Oxford, England.
Recent Paintings, Gagosian Gallery, New York ( Chelsea).
2004 Contemporary Fine Arts, Berlin.
Museo Reina Sofía, Madrid.
Galerie Lisa Ruyter, Vienna
2003 MACRO (Museo d’Arte Contemporanea Roma), Rome. Gagosian Gallery, Beverly Hills.
2002 Directions—Cecily Brown, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture
Garden, Washington, D.C.
Gagosian Gallery, New York.
2001 Days of Heaven, Contemporary Fine Arts, Berlin.
2000 Gagosian Gallery, New York ( SoHo).
1999 Serenade, Victoria Miro Gallery, London.
The Skin Game, Gagosian Gallery, Beverly Hills.
1998 High Society, Deitch Projects, New York.
1997 Spectacle, Deitch Projects, New York (Storefront Gallery).
1995 Eagle Gallery, London.

SELECTED GROUP EXHIBITIONS

2005 Getting Emotional, Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston.
The Triumph of Painting Part II, Saatchi Gallery, London.
Works on Paper, Gagosian Gallery, Beverly Hills.
Contemporary Erotic Drawing, The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, CT.
2004 Whitney Biennial 2004, Whitney Museum of American Art,
New York.
A Collector’s Vision, Museum der Moderne Salzburg.
Direct Painting, Kunsthalle Mannheim, Mannheim. Drawings, Gagosian Gallery, London.
2003 Gyroscope, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C. (through 2004).
Under Pressure: Prints from Two Palms Press, Cooper Union, New York
2001 Szenenwechsel XIX, Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt am Main.
2000 OO Drawings 2000, Barbara Gladstone Gallery, New York.
Emotional Rescue: The Contemporary Art Project Collection,
Center on Contemporary Art, Seattle.
Figure: Another Side of Modernism, Newhouse
Center for Contemporary Art at Snug Harbor Cultural Center,
New York
Greater New York: New Art in New York Now, P.S. 1
Contemporary Art Center, Long Island City, NY.
1999 At Century’s End: The John P. Morrissey Collection of 90’s Art,
The Museum of Contemporary Art, Lake Worth, FL.
Pleasure Dome, Jessica Fredericks Gallery, New York. Four
Letter Heaven, David Zwirner Video Library, New York.
Vertical Painting, P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center, Long Island
City, NY (1999-present).
1997 Janice Guy Gallery, New York.
1996 Taking Stock (curated by Kenny Schacter), New York.
1994 The Fete Worse Than Death, Laurent Delaye, London.
1990 Contemporary View, National Competition for British Art Students.

Selected Works by Cecily Brown

Teenage Wildlife, 2003,
oil on linen, 203.2 X 228.6 cm

Sock Monkey, 2003

Oil paint on linen, 228.6 X203.2 cm

LANDSCAPE, 2003,

Oil paint on linen , 228.6 x 198.1 cm

Girl on a Swing, 2004

Thanks, Roody Hooster, 2004

Oil on linen 103 x 97 inches

These Foolish Things, 2002

Oil on linen, 90 x 78 inches

Pijama Game

Oil on linen, 193 x249 cm