Cecily Brown
23 September – 30 October 2004
Galerie Lisa Ruyter is pleased to present paintings by Cecily Brown from the 23rd of September through the 30th of October, 2004.
Cecily Brown’s subjects have ranged from figures engaged in sex to landscapes, and many places in between. In a Cecily Brown painting, form and subject collide and explode, yet remain separately identifiable. De Kooning, Bacon, Goya, and Guston are referenced through moments of specificity; through a pictoral composition, a choice of color, scale, mark-making, even copying. This work is both classical and wildly experimental.
Given a shared interest in eroticism in the accumulations of flesh, it should be no surprise that Cecily Brown has looked at the work of Rubens. “Study after Paradise 1, 2 and 3” are studies made after a famous collaboration between Rubens and Brueghel the Older. In these works it becomes clear that at each pass, the artist is focusing her attentions on a different area of the original painting.
“Crapolette” is a big, red, meaty painting, with the scale and the colors of a late Philip Guston work. This rather violent painting looks like it could be a depiction of a pile of discarded bits of flesh.
Cecily Brown has been the subject of a number of museum exhibitions internationally, at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., at MACRO (Museo d’Arte Contemporanea) in Rome, and this summer at the Museo Reina Sofia in Madrid. She was featured in this years Whitney Biennial in New York. Brown has had a number of important and well-reviewed solo shows, with Deitch Projects and with Gagosian Gallery in New York, Gagosian Gallery in Beverly Hills, with Contemporary Fine Arts in Berlin, and with Victoria Miro Gallery in London.
There is currently a major exhibition of new works by Cecily Brown at Contemporary Fine Arts in Berlin.
Cecily Brown was born in 1969 in London and currently lives and works in New York City.