Cecily Brown - Modern & Contemporary Art Day Sale, Afternoon Session New York Wednesday, May 15, 2024 | Phillips

Create your first list.

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

  • Cecily Brown first made a name for herself in the New York scene with her 1997 solo show, Spectacle, at Jeffrey Deitch Projects. That same year, her edgy, vivid paintings were also included in important early group exhibitions at P.S.1. Contemporary Art Center and Janice Guy Gallery. Brown’s commitment to furthering contemporary painting led her to move from London, which was then transfixed by the YBAs, to New York City in 1994. Here, she began working on her first major body of work: a series of boisterous, copulating bunnies that includes the present example. An auspicious debut, early bunny paintings were acquired by significant collectors including the likes of Agnes Gund. Untitled (#64), 1995, is amongst these important works that set the foundation for Brown’s celebrated, nearly three decades long practice.

     

    Brown’s bunny works depict the animals engaging in rapacious sexual acts rendered in a candy-colored palate incongruous with their Bacchanalian ritual. The bunnies stand in for human actors in an astute commentary on sexuality, violence and the human condition. Identifying this series as a critical juncture within her oeuvre, Brown has reflected: “I don’t think the subject has changed much since the very beginning; there are just different ways of getting at it. I sometimes wonder, looking back on the paintings with a lot of sexual content, whether I was setting things up so that later I could be less explicit and the paintings would still be imbued with the idea of this content.”i

    “I always feel… this collaboration with the artists that I’ve looked at; they come out at different times.”
    —Cecily Brown

    A brilliant early example, Untitled (#64) is imbued with themes that have come to define the artist’s practice: vanitas, eroticism and sexuality, and a macabre sensibility. Brown masterfully draws from a wide variety of art historical references ranging from Willem de Kooning, Arshile Gorky and Francis Bacon to Hieronymus Bosch, Nicolas Poussin, Peter Paul Rubens and William Hogarth, revitalizing classical ideas with her characteristic loose, muscular brushwork, vibrant palette and expressionistic scenes.

     

    William Hogarth, A Rake’s Progress, 3: The Tavern Scene, 1735, Sir John Soane's Museum, London. Image: © Sir John Soane's Museum / Bridgeman Images

    “When Brown verges on pornography, especially in her earlier work, her accent is on the libidinous, and it certainly is meant to shock,” critic Dore Ashton writes.ii While Untitled (#64) has an edginess that is distinctly contemporary, Brown draws upon historical examples from artists who confronted societal taboos, such as Hogarth’s A Rake’s Progress, 3: The Tavern Scene, 1735. The work, also known as The Orgy, is a merry company painting set within a brothel that has been often cited by Brown. This work exemplifies Hogarth’s unflinching look at reality, a quality shared with Brown as well as artists like Bacon and Chaïm Soutine who are also important influences. Imbued with carnal tension, these scenes similarly shock in a way that reveals the artistic power of depicting complexities of the human condition.

     

    While bunnies are sometimes associated with endearing, childlike qualities of innocence and naïveté, Brown uses the motif to subversively enact scenes of hedonism. The bunny series plays on the polyvalent charge of these animals from across the European artistic tradition. In classical antiquity, rabbits symbolized fertility and sexual desire. In Christian art, rabbits possess twinned connotations: emblems of Christological rebirth and symbols of sinful lust. In the Dutch Golden Age, hunting still lifes often featured rabbits—the supreme prey animal—whose corpses reinforced the vanitas tradition’s endeavors to reveal the fleeting and ephemeral nature of life and pleasure. Untitled (#64) draws upon these layered references while also offering a provocatory scene wherein the ostensibly virtuous animals participate in a sinister act.

     

    i Cecily Brown in Cecily Brown, New York, 2008, p. 26

    ii Dore Ashton in ibid., p. 14

    • Condition Report

    • Description

      View our Conditions of Sale.

    • Provenance

      Janice Guy Gallery, New York
      Acquired from the above by the present owner

    • Exhibited

      New York, Janice Guy Gallery, Cecily Rose Brown, Bonnie Collura and Anna Gaskell, February 7–March 8, 1997

348

Untitled (#64)

signed and dated "Cecily Brown '96" on the reverse; signed and dated "Cecily Brown '96" on the stretcher
oil on linen
36 x 36 in. (91.4 x 91.4 cm)
Painted in 1996.

Full Cataloguing

Estimate
$30,000 - 40,000 

Place Advance Bid
Contact Specialist

Patrizia Koenig
Specialist, Head of Sale, Afternoon Session
+1 212 940 1279
pkoenig@phillips.com

Modern & Contemporary Art Day Sale, Afternoon Session

New York Auction 15 May 2024