PRESENTATION: Cecily Brown-Pronkstilleven
Cecily Brown makes paintings that give the appearance of being in continual flux, alive with the erotic energy of her expressive application and vivid color, shifting restlessly between abstract and figurative modes. Making reference to the giants of Western painting as well as to popular culture, she commands an aesthetic that breaks from the strictures of narrative to achieve an extraordinary visual and thematic fluidity.
By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Gladstone Gallery Archive
Cecily Brown presets her solo exhibition “Pronkstilleven”, that takes its title from pronkstilleven, a 17th-century Flemish style of still-life painting, Cecily Brown presents a series of drawings, pastels, and watercolors that celebrate a local art historical tradition through her singular and multifaceted approach to artmaking. Typically comprised of fruits, vegetables, game, flowers, and other household objects, pronkstilleven paintings were meant to signify the wealth and excessive abundance of the aristocratic class during the 1600s. Frans Snyders, an early and influential figure from this artistic movement, excelled at creating these hyperrealist, ornate settings. Similar to Brown’s larger-scale paintings, the pastels in this show take motifs from existing imagery, primarily the still life paintings of Snyders, which she transforms into entirely new works that admiringly riff off of the preceding visual material. Drawing is an integral yet lesser known component of her work, which has recently been the subject of public and museum exhibitions. Unlike the 19th-century practice of creating esquisses, or preparatory drawings and oil sketches for larger paintings, Brown’s drawings on paper are finished works unto themselves, and provide striking insights into her intuitive artmaking process. The artist notes that in order to learn an image, she takes photographs and images of paintings and copies them, however, while employing the visual language she has developed throughout her career.
Raised in suburban Surrey, England, Cecily Brown studied under painter Maggi Hambling before attending art college. Her graduation from the Slade School of Fine Art in the early 1990s coincided with the rise of the Young British Artists but she didn’t share the group’s conceptual focus, ironic stance, and embrace of celebrity culture. Having spent six months in New York as an exchange student in 1992, she returned there to live in 1994, and, alongside contemporaries such as John Currin, helped to invest figurative painting with a renewed energy and critical significance that has continued to gather momentum. Key to the success of Brown’s aesthetic is her ability to seemingly transform paint into flesh, embedding the human form within a frenzied, fragmented commentary on desire, life, and death. Her first major body of painting, from the mid-1990s, juxtaposes hedonistic rabbits with allusions to the still-life tradition; eventually, this led to the orgiastic scenes that would garner her wide and enduring recognition. In Brown’s hands, paint seems always to be in transition between liquid and solid, transparent and opaque states, and this material ballet is reflected in compositions themselves. “I think that painting is a kind of alchemy” she has said. “The paint is transformed into image, and paint and image transform themselves into a third and new thing”. Over the past twenty years, Brown’s work has evolved gradually, expanding in scale, diversifying in allusion and palette, and incorporating elements of landscape. Sometimes she uses improvisation to kick-start new paintings, allowing unplanned initial strokes to help dictate the works’ subsequent direction. On other occasions she borrows imagery from art history, popular culture, or the intersection of the two. In the studio, Brown consistently has multiple canvases in progress, moving between them in a manner that ensures a motif from one will find its way organically into another. She is also known for reworking paintings over a period of years—hardly surprising given the intense push and pull they embody.
Photo: Cecily Brown, Sauce for the Gander, 2021, Oil on linen, 17 x 19 x 1 1/2 inches (43.2 x 48.3 x 3.8 cm), © Cecily Brown, Courtesy the artist and Gladstone Gallery
Info: Gladstone Gallery, Grote Hertstraat 12 Rue du Grand Cerf, Brussels, Belgium, Duration: 17/9-30/10/2021, Days & Hours: Tue-Fri 10:00-18:00, sat 12:00-18:00, www.gladstonegallery.com
