Delightfully expressive and compellingly bold, Cecily Brown’s Bend Sinister exemplifies the artist’s prodigious synthesis of gestural abstraction with figurative allusion. Executed in 2002, the resplendent painting captures the sensual energy so entrenched in Brown’s highly sought-after early canvases with the undeniable hues of classical landscape painting. Here, the artist deftly layers sumptuous passages of pale blue sky with glimpses of verdant green interwoven with earth tones that together crescendo and manifest in a scene bursting with life. Bend Sinister is undeniably theatrical while simultaneously eliciting a softer romanticism as Brown renders a fertile scene evocative of the energy and exuberance of a fresh springt.mes afternoon. Freeing subject matter to transcend classical narrative by synthesizing practices from centuries of artistic practice, Brown emerges as an inevitable supposition of Western art history and a unique new voice of aesthetic prowess and wit. Testifying to her position as one of the foremost artists of the 21 century Brown has been the subject of solo exhibitions at institutions including the Museum of Replica Handbags s, Boston; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC; the Museum of Modern Art in Oxford and Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid.

Here, fleshy, amorous nudes lounge indulgently in a woodland while quick, jubilant sketches of hares coalesce in the center of the canvas. Brown’s landscape is an alcove for boisterous play, the threshold of which can be entered at the leisure of the viewer. Readily discernable in the present work is a deep resonance with a seemingly endless array of art historical references. Bend Sinister melts the representational into an abstracted frenzy while simultaneously suggesting Édouard Manet’s luminous rendering of the body and Joan Mitchell’s expressive, colorful brushstrokes. In reference to her work the artist stated: “I think that painting is a kind of alchemy… the paint is transformed into image, and hopefully paint and image transform themselves into a third and new thing… I want to catch something in the act of becoming something else” (Cecily Brown, “Painting Sensations,” 2005, p. 55). Brown brings forth the vernacular of legendary painters across the history of art, abstracting her forms while retaining the grand narrative impact of her forebears and in doing so achieves a novel alchemy within her paintings.

Brown’s thickly layered gestural marks immerse the viewer in a fantasy, so that the orgiastic application of paint simulates an excited nervous system. In Bend Sinister, painting works like poetry, each stroke of pigment flowing into the next. Rose joins with bright turquoise, forest green and lavender, heather grey and creamy brown, burnt sienna and peachy orange. Brown’s painting engages the viewer in a full body experience, as texture and hue arouse poignant sensorial memories.

The weather in Brown’s arcadia is equal parts cool and dewy—like an early morning— and hot and humid—like midsummer noon. Art critic Dore Ashton describes how Brown constructs her desirable worlds, “For a painter, a painting is a place. The whole meaning of illusion lies there, in creating the reality of a place within which the regard of the viewer is absorbed and rendered other. Brown herself is the first viewer, always susceptible to the enchantments of the density of paint, of color, as they perform events on the canvas surface. Most of Brown’s work evolves serially. She may have as many as ten canvases that she visits, like a bee seeking nectar, placing a stroke or several strokes on one canvas, before moving on to another, and another. In each move lies a quest, and in each brush stroke lies a promise” (Dore Ashton, “Cecily Brown En Route,” 2008, p. 20).

Contemporary Art

IN FOCUS: Cecily Brown from The collects ion of Douglas S. Cramer