Cecily Brown: Where, When, How Often and with Whom

by Cecily Brown (Artist), Poul Erik Tøjner (Foreword), Anders Kold (Editor)

The British painter Cecily Brown (born 1969), based in New York since the 1990s, is one of the central figures internationally in the resurgence of painting since the turn of the century. Combining abstraction and figuration, she creates vivid, atmospheric depictions of fragmented bodies, often in erotic positions in the midst of swells of color and movement.

Brown pays tribute to the potential of painting for seduction, and draws on references ranging from pornography to elements from the visual worlds of Bosch, Goya, and Hogarth, and most recently motifs from the human disasters of our own time. Having also been compared to painters like Bacon and de Kooning, Brown’s work offers a female artist’s gaze at a world dominated by male artists.

This catalog is published for an exhibition at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark, comprising paintings as well as drawings and monotypes from the past 20 years.

Genres: Art

142 pages, Softcover

Published April 23, 2019

Reviews

[Servabo · Rating 3 out of 5]

Many painters, among them Cecily Brown, describe painting as possessing the ability to sometimes override the painter. While some see this as the greatest joy, a momentary flow of aesthetic integrity beyond the artist's intentions, for Brown it only steps up the need for intervention. She resists, often latching on to figures or narrative fragments amidst the storm.

The physicality of painting - not choices, or the lack of them - is what creates this dynamic between he abstract and the figurative. A painting is not separate from the process that created it. It lives by constantly unfolding its own history. The painting and the act of painting it are sometimes the same.

[Dakota · Rating 3 out of 5]

The paintings are obviously fantastic. The commentary by the male critics is less so.

[katie lawlor · Rating 4 out of 5]

cecily brown the painter that you are.

i will not shut up about this