CECILY BROWN (B. 1969)

A delicious mélange of pinks, roses, peaches and fleshy hues, Untitled from 2007-2008 is one of a cluster of paintings that Dore Ashton calls “her most coherent to date, bespeak[ing] a rapidly maturing painterly mind” (D. Ashton, Cecily Brown, p. 20). Measuring 25 x 22 inches, it triumphs with the same visual power and elegance as her largest-scale works, proving Brown’s prowess in whatever scale she approaches. It is both rhythmic and energetic, fresh and art historical, loosely organic and yet simultaneously entirely abstract.

With the interweave of colors and subtle suggestions of representation, it cannily calls to mind the masters to whom Brown admittedly looks: Delacroix’s juxtaposition of colors, Bosch’s density of imagery, El Greco’s exaggerated tendencies. “I feel inseparable from the history of European painting; I definitely feel steeped in it” (C. Brown quoted in “Cecily Brown in Conversation with Lari Pittman” in Cecily Brown, ed. R. Dergan (New York: 2008), p. 25). With ingenuity and allure, she positions herself prodigiously in an eminent lineage of art historical greats.