“You really feel like you’re looking at a galaxy or something from a distance. But I’ve always played with that change of scale within a painting, partly because I’ve always loved embracing the idea that it’s this highly artificial world.”
L ush verdant hues and cobalt-rich strokes imbue the surface of Cecily Brown’s Untitled with a dynamic sensuality, a product of the artist’s prodigious fusion of painterly abstraction and figurative allusion. Over the course of her acclaimed career, Brown has expressed themes deeply rooted in hedonistic human desire, fragmented flora and fauna, and the unexplored faculties of sensory experience. Executed in 2017, the present work unfurls a fertile scene teeming with life and energy. Here, Brown exercises her masterful grasp on the color green, exploring its tonalities in order to generate depth and movement. Vivid blues, deep reds, and ethereal pinks accentuate the work, resulting in a symphonic whirlwind that captures the viewer with its kaleidoscopic alchemy.
Brown’s style of resplendent abstraction finds its roots within the canon of art history. Her decadent subject matter takes cues from the Old Masters and the Baroque, while her prismatic experiments in perception echo that of the Impressionists. The immersive coloring and sumptuous brushwork of Untitled certainly evokes the work of Abstract Expressionists such as Joan Mitchell, Lee Krasner, and Willem de Kooning, while transporting the viewer to a wholly original, kaleidoscopic realm of perception. For Brown, each work is a site for vivacious exploration: “The paintings are like doors flung open suddenly to reveal something shocking. Because they are so energetic they might also be viewed as moments of a movie whose sudden arrest causes the mind’s eye to trip over itself in its own voracity, tangling in dense webs of coloured light, striving to make order of intense and disordered sensations” (Robert Evrén in: Exh. Cat., Rome, Gagosian Gallery, Cecily Brown, 2011, p. 1).
Untitled is a fantastical demonstration of Brown’s inimitable manipulation of oil on canvas – she imbues the medium with the power to entrance and conjure. The work’s swirling streaks of paint bloom into a microcosm of chromatic brilliance that lies in a miraculous space between abstraction and figuration. By inviting viewers to immerse themselves in Untitled’s vibrant forms, Brown commands a dimension charged with vivacity and indulgence, thus encapsulating the ethos of her singular artistic project.
