art
May 3, 2024

Art Knowledge: "Summer of Love" by Cecily Brown

How these two forget how they indulge and almost dissolve it - so you have to imagine the 39-year-old Cecily Brown painting. The dainty bundle of energy is on the move, bringing things to life on the screen that are worth six-figure sums to collectors like Elton John and photographer Mario Testino.
Cecily Brown manages to bring the approximate, the fused to life. A face like that of the man in this picture, which is not really one, can be seen quite clearly for the beholder, just as a leg like that of the woman who was just there can only be a line.
Tears from porno magazines are templates for images like this one. Brown is especially interested in the fact that these scenes are extremely emotionally charged. The painter's art is not about hard sex, but about the intensity of such moments.
Cecily Brown always paints with oil on canvas. It is also classic how she creates depth of space through warm and cold colors. Here comes the orange-brown body, the gray-brown and the blue remain in the background.
Francisco de Goya, James Ensor, Francis Bacon - the great masters of art have already looked at young Cecily very closely. Already as a teenager, she frequently traveled with David Sylvester, an eminence among art critics.
She did not know that Sylvester was her father until the age of 21. Afterwards, her big name at home in London became a burden for her. So, after graduating from the Slade School of Fine Arts, she moved to New York, where she became a waitress to paint.
At 28 she had her first solo show and quickly became an art star. She tasted it, celebrated wild parties, staged herself in "Vanity Fair" and "Vogue". And I honestly said in an interview, "I have always been arrogant about my art, I just wanted as many people as possible to see my work."
She lives and works in a loft in Manhattan - within sight of Andy Warhol's former factory. Surrounded by almost finished pictures, which she misses the last stroke at the right moment.
In the huge studio, she pushes man-sized mirrors on rollers back and forth, so that they stand exactly in the back while painting. If she wants to look at her with a little distance, what she has just painted, she does not have to get off the ladder, just turn around.
In the future she will separate living and painting more strongly. Last year she married architecture critic Nicolai Ouroussoff and both are expecting a child. It will then no longer be possible to spend 15 hours a day between solvents. For a virtuoso like Brown, it would be exciting to follow the change in her life in her pictures.

The exhibition will run until 30th August, www.deichtorhallen.de