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Lot Essay
"Melting starlets, sharks, gargoyles, dogs, plumage, mountains, fountains, waterfalls, woods, weather, skulls, skies, false teeth, gummy (candy) lips, blue eye shadow, cliffs of Dover, phantasmagoria, deserts, Milky Way, baby devils, swings, trapeze, tight-rope, caramel, penguins, paper water-flowers, toy cars, scrolls, fans, labial eyes, slack mouths, flags, jumping jacks, ghost, storms, kebabs and lollipops, and Babylon (Cecily Brown, Cecily Brown Paintings 1998-2000, exh. cat., New York, 2000, n.p.).
Over the past decade, Cecily Brown's study of painting had been a rebellious tour de force. Her passion for the medium of has resulted in grand and ambitious canvases revealing her respect for and inspiration from the history of art, from Goya, Poussin and Hogarth to Lucien Freud and Willem de Kooning. Brown studies and willingly excavates the past while reinvigorating contemporary painting.
Painted in 2006, Skulldiver 2 is a monumental, active depiction of perhaps the greatest subject matter of all time. Drawing on pornographic sources, Brown references the voluptuous tradition in Western picture making. The composition features fleshy and contorted limbs merging together in a bacchanal-esq celebration of lust and desire.
"The paint on the surface of the canvas appears to breathe, making her paintings come alive with a human presence and, more significantly, with human sexuality. In Brown's work, paint literally becomes skin (J. Fleming, "Cecily Brown: Living Pictures," Cecily Brown, exh. cat., The Des Moines Art Center, 2006, p. 49).
Over the past decade, Cecily Brown's study of painting had been a rebellious tour de force. Her passion for the medium of has resulted in grand and ambitious canvases revealing her respect for and inspiration from the history of art, from Goya, Poussin and Hogarth to Lucien Freud and Willem de Kooning. Brown studies and willingly excavates the past while reinvigorating contemporary painting.
Painted in 2006, Skulldiver 2 is a monumental, active depiction of perhaps the greatest subject matter of all time. Drawing on pornographic sources, Brown references the voluptuous tradition in Western picture making. The composition features fleshy and contorted limbs merging together in a bacchanal-esq celebration of lust and desire.
"The paint on the surface of the canvas appears to breathe, making her paintings come alive with a human presence and, more significantly, with human sexuality. In Brown's work, paint literally becomes skin (J. Fleming, "Cecily Brown: Living Pictures," Cecily Brown, exh. cat., The Des Moines Art Center, 2006, p. 49).