Cecily Brown (1969 -)

Précis

Cecily Brown was born in London in 1969 and currently lives and works in New York. She has had solo shows in the Gagosian and Deitch Projects galleries in New York, and in the Victoria Miro and Eagle galleries in London. Brown has also been included in numerous group shows, including "Greater New York" at P.S.1/MOMA. Her works are highly energetic oil paintings depicting the human figure during sex with a mix of abstraction and representation.

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Excerpts from an interview with Odili Donald Odita in Flash Art, Nov-Dec 2000

Cecily Brown

"Figures are the only thing that I've ever painted. I'm interested in the human need or desire to represent itself. I'm fascinated with human narcissism and obsessions with bodies."

"...I love the trick of painting. You can have the movement within the still thing, but it is completely fixed. And that illusion is constantly exciting."

ODO: It the unanswerable... the insatiable... who, or what are we?
"CB: Yeah, and not to sound too cheesy, but making art is, in a way, a metaphor for that. It's asking questions more than coming up with any answers. In a way that's why they can be read in so many different ways."

ODO: Do you paint with an acknowledgement of Western painting as a reflection of the Caucasian male gaze, or are you conscious of the way you paint your forms as Cecily Brown, the woman?
"CB: I'm afraid this might not be the politically correct answer, but I think that my love of painting has always come before any critique of the fact that it's racist, or sexist. If someone thinks De Kooning is a misogynist that's fair enough. His feelings about his subject are less important to me than whether it works as a striking image, or if it's brilliantly done. It happens that it mostly has been done by men, but that's changing. I must admit, not until I started showing had I heard people say it was nice to see this being done by a woman. I was kind of like, 'duh,' I'm just painting. I heard these responses when I first exhibited those paintings at Deitch Projects. It is kind of a sad thing that we can't necessarily look to a woman artist from the past and say I want to paint like her. I grew up saying I want to paint like Caravaggio or Goya. But, my attitude is that male and female aren't so different, and of course, I can say that. It's a wonderful time to be a woman. Women at the end of the 21st century won't even question their heroes in that way."