Cecily Brown - Contemporary Art Part I New York Thursday, November 15, 2007 | Phillips

Create your first list.

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

  • Provenance

    Gagosian Gallery, New York

  • Exhibited

    New York, Gagosian Gallery, Cecily Brown, January 14 – February 19, 2000

  • Literature

    R. Evrén, A.M. Holmes, and E. Wingate, Cecily Brown Paintings 1998-2000, New York, 2000, cat. no. 1, pp. 14-15 (illustrated)

  • Catalogue Essay

    In her lush and shameless paintings Cecily Brown melds the figurativeand the abstract, and all with great bravado. She derives from the greattradition of painting—abstract expressionists such as de Kooning andMitchell, British landscape painting as well as old masters such as Goya.The voluptuous surfaces and explosive brushwork of her paintings buildphantasmagoric scenes of tumultuous revelries as figures fervently yetlyrically metamorphosize or just dissolve into paint. “Each one is a movie,a true motion picture, building up and breaking down.There are constantchanges in perspective, in tempo. One image/impulse begets the next,mutating, morphing, becoming something else entirely...” (R. Evrén, A.M.Holmes, and E.Wingate, Cecily Brown, Paintings 1998-2000, NewYork, 2000,p. 68.) Brown’s feminine perspective inverts the expected male brazennessand voyeuristic gaze.The bawdy scenes own the canvas, and take thepower.There is both blood and guts edginess, and pretty-girlie of pinks andpurples.This insolence is stridently expressed in The Girl Who Had Everything,where lovely pinks and reds are pushed across the canvas with heat andswelling warmth that challenges the viewer.The painting has an air ofinstinct over logic, but is not without method. “Brown’s work can make onethink simultaneously of eighteenth-century Libertinism and the celebratoryorgies of ancient religious cults,” (ibid, p. 10).

25

The Girl Who Had Everything

1998
Oil on linen.
99 1/2 x 110 in. (252.7 x 279.4 cm).
Signed and dated “Cecily Brown 98” on the reverse and stretcher bar.

Estimate
$600,000 - 800,000 

Sold for $1,105,000

Contemporary Art Part I

15 Nov 2007, 7pm
New York