Cecily Brown
Untitled, 2011
Oil on linen
23 x 31 inches (58.4 x 78.7 cm)
© Cecily Brown
Cecily Brown’s paintings swing precariously from improvisation to more conscious control, from abstraction to figuration—avoiding closure, revelling in ambiguity and surprise. . . Her recent paintings have turned up the volume of this tumultuous beauty.
—Klaus Kertess, 2011
Since the mid-1990s, Cecily Brown’s densely worked paintings have explored the allusive potential of gestural abstraction. Her sensuous works reference masters from the Western art-historical canon—from Paolo Veronese, Peter Paul Rubens, and Eugène Delacroix, to Willem de Kooning and Francis Bacon—as well as popular culture, with a visual and narrative fluidity achieved through seductive brushwork. Describing her works as a “retinal Rorschach,” Brown transforms the act of viewing, revealing the ease with which reality slides into fantasy, imagination, and desire.
While many of Brown’s earliest works are explicitly erotic, her practice evolved to incorporate subjects with greater ambiguity and mystery. Untitled (2011) is marked by forms that by turns come apart and cohere, finding tension and release in the interplay of fragmented shapes. Its lush verdant and earthy palette recalls a forest or jungle scene, with glimpses of a blue sky in the upper left, and perhaps a curving tree trunk descending from the top edge. The symphony of painterly gestures presents a sumptuous landscape which hovers between surface and depth, pulsing with a frenzied energy.
In 2012, Brown observed, “Franz Kline said, ‘oil paint never behaves the same way twice’ and it’s true.” Unlike her YBA peers, who favored subversive, conceptual modes of expression, Brown has sought inspiration in the malleable properties of paint. In her works, the medium takes on an alchemic quality, transitioning between liquid and solid, transparent and opaque states, and this material ballet is reflected in her sensual compositions. With nods to her forebears, from the pastoral scenes of the Old Masters to Joan Mitchell’s vibrant renderings of her garden, Untitled transcends classical and historic notions of the landscape genre, while celebrating the sensory pleasure of painting.