Cecily Brown - Contemporary Art Evening Sale London Friday, October 12, 2007 | Phillips

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  • Provenance

    Deitch Projects, New York

  • Catalogue Essay

    Vivid, thick and textured brushstrokes are the artistic characteristics that best describe Cecily Brown’s painterly style. Often creating large scale works, Carousel, an intimately scaled diptych is a work that is paramount to the artist’s development as a painter. Proving herself as a recognised female artist working in a male dominated art world today, this work is signature in describing her painterly oeuvre. Loading her canvases with layers of paint, Brown’s art is one of dialogue and interpretation, where her fusion of figuration and abstraction constantly seem to leave the spectator in a state of uncertainty and contemplation.

    Fusing figuration and abstraction as one; by painting abstracted figures or figurative abstraction, Brown invites any viewer to make sense of her vanishing and re-surfacing imagery – imagery that has become obscured through her technique of obliterating any immediate recognition of subject matter. This in turn locks the viewer into the painting, by constantly trying to fixate one's eye on a figure that blurs and fragments into a mesh of colour.

    As a diptych, Carousel is an important work in Brown’s own development, revealing itself as one of transition, clearly defining a shift in both style and technique. In a sense, the painting becomes a dialogue between the artist and her progression, intertwining past, present and future, using the canvas as a platform, which on the one hand acts as a surface of refelction and on the other as a surface of projection.

292

Carousel

1997
Diptych: Oil on canvas.
14 x 11 in. (35.5 x 27.9 cm) each; 14 x 22 in. (35.5 x 55.8 cm) overall.
Signed and dated “Cecily Brown ‘97” on the reverse of each panel.

Estimate
£70,000 - 90,000 ‡♠

Sold for £114,000

Contemporary Art Evening Sale

Evening Sale
13 October 2007, 4pm
London