Cecily Brown, Stop Ignoring Me Sorrel, 2010, oil on canvasd, 43.18 x 63.5 cm, Courtesy Contemporary Fine Arts, Berlin; Gagosian Gallery, New York, Foto: Jochen Littkemann.

Cecily Brown, Based On A True Story, 2010, oil on canvas, 215.9 x 226.06 cm, Courtesy Contemporary Fine Arts, Berlin; Gagosian Gallery, New York, Foto: Jochen Littkemann.

Cecily Brown, Lady With a Little Dog, 2009-2010, oil on canvas, 246.38 x 226.06 cm, Particuliere collectie, Courtesy Contemporary Fine Arts, Berlin; Gagosian Gallery, New York, Foto Jochen Littkemann.

GEM Museum of Contemporary Art
Stadhouderslaan 43
+ 31 (0)70 - 33 811 33
The Hague
Cecily Brown Based On A True Story
November 20, 2010-February 27, 2011

The new work of New York-based artist Cecily Brown (b.1969) features a medley of grey, red, orange and earth colours applied with vigorous gestures to canvases of many different sizes. Initially, the explicitly sexual content of her pictures attracted attention; more recently, she has increasingly reduced the image to its essentials. Shifting between figuration and abstraction, she uses each approach to reinforce the other, viewing them not as two separate worlds, but as closely interrelated facets of the art of painting. Although this winter’s show at the GEM museum of contemporary art is Cecily Brown’s first ever solo exhibition in the Netherlands, in America she has for years been regarded as a leading artist of our day. Her work features in top collections like those of the Guggenheim Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York and Tate Modern in London.

Brown grew up in England. She is the daughter of author Shena Mackay and well-known British art critic David Sylvester. Her father played a particularly important part in her early life as an artist, fostering her love of art by introducing her to the works of Francis Bacon and Picasso. Brown’s current sources of inspiration include old masters like Rubens, Poussin and Titian, as well as modern artists like Bacon, De Kooning and Arshile Gorky. With the first she shares her love of the human body and with the second her taste for large canvases and an expressive style. In England she felt out of place at the start of her career by the sensationalism of the Young British Artists (including Damien Hirst), who were then the movers and shakers in the British art world. There seemed to be little place for her kind of painting. In 1996 she moved to New York, where she found that — precisely because she was an outsider: young, female and foreign — she could win rapid success in the male-dominated world of abstract expressionism. Where the abstract expressionism of Pollock and De Kooning is rough and macho, Brown’s is sensual and sophisticated.

Brown’s work is all about seeing and is a stirring celebration of painting. Her paintings show bodies or landscapes apparently dissolving in an atmospheric maelstrom of colour and paint. In her early paintings, when she was still depicting attention-grabbing nudes in explicitly sexual poses, she was interested not just in offering an image, a story, for viewers to look at, but also in the feeling of discomfort that the image might evoke in the viewer. The feeling of being a voyeur: of seeing something that should really be private. In recent years, however, her work has become increasingly abstract, lending a new dimension to the act of visual attention in which she seeks to engage the viewer. Rather than the content of the painting, it is now the painterly method itself that is intended to hold the viewer’s attention. Her latest paintings are about the instant of seeing and the physical action of painting. They are about the way colours and gestures create independent visual worlds encompassing mere hints of figuration. In her 2010 painting Based on a True Story, for example, it is almost impossible to make out the subject. All that the viewer can distinguish is the face of a woman lying on her back. The remainder of the scene is so vaguely represented that attention no longer focuses on what is depicted, but on how it has been done.

The exhibition is being organised in close cooperation with Kestnergesellschaft Hannover.

The exhibition is accompanied by a lavishly illustrated catalogue containing essays by Angus Cook and Kathrin Meyer (price: € 24.90).

Cecily Brown, Thriller, 2008, oil on canvas, 276.86 x 434.34 cm, Courtesy Contemporary Fine Arts, Berlin; Gagosian Gallery, New York, Foto: Jochen Littkemann.

Cecily Brown, Summer Love, 2000. Oil on canvas. 190.5 x 228.6 cm, © Cecily Brown. Courtesy Thomas Holdings Inc. Collection.

Cecily Brown, Crapolette, 2003. Oil on canvas. 182.9 x 243.8 cm, © Cecily Brown. Collection Thaddaeus Ropac Salzburg / Paris.

Cecily Brown, Teenage Wildlife, 2003, Oil on Linen, 203 x 229cm.

Cecily Brown, Canopy, 2003-4, Oil on linen, 203,2 x 203,2 cm, © Cecily Brown. Courtesy Gagosian Gallery.

Cecily Brown, Aujourd'hui Rose, 2005, Oil on linen, 195,6 x 139,7 cm, © Cecily Brown. Courtesy Gagosian Gallery.

Deichtorhallen Hamburg
Deichtorstrasse 1-2
Hamburg
+49 (0) 40-321030
Cecily Brown
April 25-August 30, 2009

This is New York-London painter Cecily Brown's first major exhibition in Europe and features 45 works from 1998 to the present.

The themes of Brown's large canvases are usually erotic and, in terms of color, border on the abstract. Brown uses erotic photographs as studies for the finished canvases, though her interest is in the emotional content of the photos, Her energy-loaded images on the border between abstraction and figuration have been some of the most striking images in contemporary in the last ten years.

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. 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. "I'm more interested in sublimation. I love the way Francis Bacon talked about the grin without the cat, the sensation without the boredom of its conveyance … I've always wanted to be able to convey figurative imagery in a kind of shorthand, to get it across in as direct a way as possible. I want there to be a human presence without having to depict it in full," says Brown.

She often titles her paintings after classic Hollywood films, such as The Pyjama Game and The Fugitive Kind. Drawing elements of these dramatic genres through her emotive painting style, 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.

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 bedfellows: extraordinarily beautiful and wickedly tempting.

She has established herself as one of the key figures in the strong resurgence of painting at the end of the nineties and 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.

Brown is collected by major museums around the world such as the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York or the Tate Gallery, London — and is considered as a shooting star of a new expressive painting.

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 institutions as 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 and P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center, Long Island City, NY.

Brown was born in London in 1969. She studied in London and received her Bachelors in 1993 in Fine Arts from the Slade School of Art in London. 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, both were met with tremendous critical and commercial success.

Cecily Brown, Study after paradise 3, 2003. 121.9 x 152.4 cm, Oil on canvas. © Cecily Brown, Courtesy Sammlung Essl, Klosterneuburg / Austria. Fotonachweis: Mischa Nawrata, Wien.