Exuberant and respiring with life, Untitled (Trapeze) from 1997 is a paragon of Cecily Brown’s virtuosic practice. A fervor of swirls, dancing in a singular surreptitious act, arabesque in a harmony of color and motion towards all four corners of the tableau. Executed during the watershed of her prodigious thirty-year career, 1997 set the tone for Brown’s life-long immutable astonishment of nascent aesthetics. By this point, Brown's ebullient, serpentine compositions had gained traction in the modern art landscape, but her breakthrough assumed form in a solo show that year at Deitch Projects in New York-Jeffrey Deitch’s first exhibition of a painter. Soon after, she cemented herself as a leader within the vein of Modern Expressivism, and a constituent of the enfant terrible cabal. Since this onset of her lush exploration of flesh, Brown has drawn the attention, fascination, and ire of the contemporary art zeitgeist. An eclectic and electrifying painter, art critic Barry Schwabsky noted her brutalitarian notoriety, stemming from “a brittle, agitated self-consciousness about transgression” (Barry Schwabsky, “On Cecily Brown”, Artforum, NOVEMBER 1998, Print). Unquestionably one of the most innovative and respected artists of the 21st century and trained at the prestigious Slade School of Replica Handbags in London, Brown acquiesced painterly traditions in pursuit of assimilating Classicism into a revolutionary visual vernacular. In Untitled (Trapeze), her orgiastic composition, rich painterly gestures, and zealous undulations meet in a frenetic consonance, attesting to Brown’s elusive abstraction of the body and sexuality.

Unflinching in her frontalism, Brown lays bare carnal desire and the fervor of sex, boldly staking her claim in a psychological space previously unexplored- particularly by women artists. While men and women within the historical art canon have long devoted their works and oeuvre to the pictorial deification of the feminine mystique, seldom has either end of the spectrum sensationalized the tantric male and female form. Irreverent of artistic dialectic, Brown’s work gorges upon its own legacy, trumping the virile narrative behind work of a similar nature- instead evincing Sappho and ultimately displaying a sublime soliloquy.

Standing at odds with the conceptual approach of her constituents known as the Young British Artists, Brown distanced herself from them and opted to render her vision within the traditional vein of painting. Subsequently, a palpably ironic sense of abstinence delineates her medium, but subtending her work is an individualist focus on the materiality of paint to prompt deeper questions pertinent to artistic praxis. Unabashedly evoking the Baroque flamboyance of Peter Paul Rubens, and the gestural Expressionism of de Kooning, Brown radically indulges in libidinous figurations, advancing and receding within a sensuously abstracted stratum of paint and pigment. On this painterly syncopation, Brown reflects, “I take all my cues from the paint, so it's this total back-and-forth between my will and the painting directing what to do next. The painting has a completely different idea than I do about what it should be. Things just naturally break down and become more abstract. When things get too abstract, I definitely feel like I want to bring the figure back. There is a line that I'm always striving for that's not halfway between figuration and abstraction, it is both. It's almost like pulling a moment of claritys in the middle of all the chaos” (Cecily Brown in conversation with Derek Peck, “Cecily Brown,' Another, 14 September 2012, Print). This maxim attests to the sheer haptics of her cacophonic surfaces. Despite the horror vacui of these works, there is a resolute delicateness and rhythmic fluidity underpinning Untitled (Trapeze) ostensible restlessness.

Centered on the ever-shifting dynamics of existence, Brown imbues the present work with titillating and ineffable sensations of a corporeal nature. Flushed and rouge gyrations intertwine, conveying motion, heat and then contact within coalesced layers of paint, obscuring the remnants of human figures underneath a labyrinth of vibrancy. Swathes of milky white, caressed by whispers of sienna and black, meet an abundant range of pink and the shimmering surface, enlivened by Brown’s delicate balance of painterly caesuras and lyrical figurations, envelops the viewer in a promiscuous bacchanal of fragmented bodies, oscillating in begotten space. Within her clandestine figuration is a palpable sense of de Kooning’s influence, coursing through the entropic chaos of the ribald scene. On de Kooning, the artist mused, “..Around 1989, I distinctly remember looking at a catalogue of de Kooning’s work…realizing that every square inch of the canvas had a life, an energy and a strength. It was exhilarating to see somebody use paint in a way that appeared to be free, but obviously there was this great.mes asure of control” (Cecily Brown, Willem De Kooning: Conversation with Cecily Brown, Bordercrossings, Issue 121, Print).) De Kooning’s work left a lasting impression on Brown, ushering her towards the quintessential dimensionality of her resulting oeuvre. Resultantly, Untitled (Trapeze) plane is a biomorphic weave of abstractive gesture and clandestine figuration; Visions of flesh burst forth from paint-saturated inversions of the brush, cloaking limbs and skin stretching out between peaks and valleys of impasto- inviting viewers to an inundating tempest of primal embrace.

By shrouding human physicality in its most bare incarnation, Brown draws forth a glimmering and visceral spectrum of sent.mes nt from the deepest recesses of intimacy. Brown has spent her career dismantling the boundaries of her medium from within its very own margins, parallelizing artistic diametric with her innovative approach. Manifested within this conviction, Untitled (Trapeze) exists as a bridge of unutterable breadth between painting and sex—the un-abrasive motion and eroticism is an emulation of tissue, emotional tension, and the heat of ecstasy. Brown is compelled to depict entities in carnal embrace, because, in her words, human sexuality is “universal. It’s not obscure... Sex is such a driving force, a life force- even the simple fact that’s how we’re here.” In the present work, Brown has broken apart the very semantics of painting, metamorphosed the motif of the body and laid conceptual foundations that have heavily influenced the new-age perspective on Abstract Expressionism. Brown’s control over her deviant depictions of skin, sex, and human physicality has established her as one of the most revered female artists working today; Consequently, her work is on display in distinguished institutions around the world, including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; and Tate, London.

Contemporary Art

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