Cecily Brown - Contemporary Art Part I New York Thursday, May 15, 2008 | Phillips

Create your first list.

Select an existing list or create a new list to share and manage lots you follow.

  • Provenance


    Victoria Miro Gallery, London

  • Literature


    A. Gingeras and B. Schwabsky, The Triumph of Painting, 2005, p. 133 and back cover (illustrated)

  • Catalogue Essay


    "It is about being a painter, here, now, at this moment when it is ok to paint again, incredibly conscious of the past and then throwing it off…And it is about paint—wet, liquid, spreadable, mutable. It is about paint doing what bodies do during sex, pressing up, greasy, rubbing, penetrating, slipping, saturated. It is hard to know where the figures stop and start, there are extra body parts, free floating appendages, an orgy, magically real…It is about being a girl and painting like a boy. The male gaze repossessed, kidnapped: enough of how you look at us, this is how we see you…a woman painting a man as brazenly, as unforgivingly as men have always painted women… It is cooled down under varnish, fixed behind a veneer that is almost glass, laminated to keep it at a certain distance to protect it or perhaps more to protect you."  (A.M. Holmes, “Motion Pictures,” Cecily Brown, 2000, pp. 70-71) 
    Known for her unique paint-handling, Cecily Brown’s canvases are unmistakable in their grasp of sexuality and human contact.The thick, luscious, and broad strokes of paint are unmistakably inspired by the abstract expressionist’s approach to the canvas. Brown’s own influences are grounded in de Kooning’s Woman paintings, whose faces emerge monstrously from broad swaths of thickly applied impasto paint. Brown’s abstractions are firmly grounded, paradoxically, in the figure. Hard, Fast and Beautiful contains overtures to the aftermath of two couples frolicking on the canvas; a masculine sexual fantasy savored from the feminine artistic perspective.

133

Hard, Fast and Beautiful

2000
Oil on canvas.
100 x 110 in. (254 x 279.4 cm).

Estimate
$600,000 - 800,000 

Sold for $657,000

Contemporary Art Part I

15 May 2008, 7pm
New York