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Lot Essay
A large-scale canvas alive with lush brushwork and raw sensuality, Single Room Furnished (2000) is a vivid early painting by Cecily Brown. Against a backdrop of churning pink and red impasto, two figures are caught in carnal embrace. The woman lies back with her legs in the air, her luminous skin contrasting with the dark, muscular limbs of her companion. Her upper body is a tumult of flushed and marbled colour, as if the blood has rushed to her head. Part of a bedframe can be glimpsed in the foreground, while the sheets have become a silken river of white and umber streaks. As with a number of Brown’s paintings from this period, the work’s title refers to a Golden Age Hollywood movie: Single Room Furnished is a 1968 drama starring the ‘blonde bombshell’ Jayne Mansfield in her final major role. Mansfield plays three different characters in the film, which is set in a New York apartment building. Painted during her own first decade in New York, where she had moved from London in 1994, Brown’s painting speaks to the joy, success and creative freedom she found in the city. ‘This is an intoxicating time to be painting,’ she wrote in 1998, ‘and New York an exhilarating and sympathetic climate. The mood is generous and open and eclectic’ (C. Brown, ‘Painting Epiphany’, Flash Art, no. 200, May-June 1998).
When she graduated from London’s Slade School of Art in 1993, Brown’s practice stood in lavish contrast to the more conceptual stance of her Young British Artist contemporaries. In New York, where painting was undergoing a revival, she received a warm welcome. The city was also charged with inspiration for Brown as the birthplace of Abstract Expressionism: Willem de Kooning, who died in 1997, was still living on Long Island when she arrived. Brown’s work reflects a close dialogue with de Kooning, who famously claimed that ‘flesh is the reason oil paint was invented.’ While her later works would become more abstract, Brown’s early figuration dealt with distinctly erotic subject matter, bringing the medium’s power to voluptuous life. ‘I think when I was doing a lot of sexual paintings,’ she has said, ‘what I wanted ... was for the paint to embody the same sensations that bodies would. Oil paint very easily suggests bodily fluids and flesh’ (C. Brown, quoted in G. Wood, ‘I like the cheap and nasty’, The Observer, 12 June 2005). The physical force of Single Room Furnished is unmistakable, the paint pulsing and fluorescing with light and motion. With its foregrounding of female pleasure, it also subverts the narratives of heroic masculinity so often associated with the work of de Kooning and other Abstract Expressionists, taking gestural strokes and visceral colour to a new sensory arena.
Brown’s approach is equally indebted to the fleshy, sometimes violent visions of Francis Bacon, as well as to masters of the deeper art-historical past. Even as she explores fresh frontiers and new possibilities, Brown’s works speak in their language and seduce with their lessons. The Baroque hedonism of Rubens, the earthy carnivalesque of Bosch and Brueghel, and the chromatic drama and romance of Delacroix can all be glimpsed in the present work’s opulent, metamorphic surface. ‘The more I look at paintings,’ she has said, ‘the more I want to paint, the more engaged I become and the deeper and richer it gets’ (C. Brown, quoted in R. Enright, ‘Paint Whisperer: An Interview with Cecily Brown’, Border Crossings, no. 93, February 2005, p. 40).
While Single Room Furnished is unabashedly erotic, any narrative behind the scene remains ambiguous. The male figure is indistinct, the woman’s features unclear; anchored only by the bedframe, the setting itself becomes a whirlwind of abstract brushwork. It is a grand, passionate love affair with paint itself that takes centre stage. ‘I’m far more interested in a moment where figuration breaks down,’ Brown explains. ‘I usually describe it as breaking down rather than abstract because it really is this back and forth. Some works ... have far clearer graphic imagery and others really don’t. It’s always been important to me to have both, and some works walk the tight rope and have both within a painting’ (C. Brown, quoted in ‘Cecily Brown Interview: Take No Prisoners’, Louisiana Channel: Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, 3 November 2015). In the movie Single Room Furnished, the titular room is a claustrophobic space, reflecting the entrapment of a woman constrained by troubled relationships and a chaotic lifestyle. In Brown’s hands, it becomes a wonderland of painterly liberty, bodily momentum and sensory indulgence, drawing the viewer irresistibly into its heady splendours of vision and touch.
When she graduated from London’s Slade School of Art in 1993, Brown’s practice stood in lavish contrast to the more conceptual stance of her Young British Artist contemporaries. In New York, where painting was undergoing a revival, she received a warm welcome. The city was also charged with inspiration for Brown as the birthplace of Abstract Expressionism: Willem de Kooning, who died in 1997, was still living on Long Island when she arrived. Brown’s work reflects a close dialogue with de Kooning, who famously claimed that ‘flesh is the reason oil paint was invented.’ While her later works would become more abstract, Brown’s early figuration dealt with distinctly erotic subject matter, bringing the medium’s power to voluptuous life. ‘I think when I was doing a lot of sexual paintings,’ she has said, ‘what I wanted ... was for the paint to embody the same sensations that bodies would. Oil paint very easily suggests bodily fluids and flesh’ (C. Brown, quoted in G. Wood, ‘I like the cheap and nasty’, The Observer, 12 June 2005). The physical force of Single Room Furnished is unmistakable, the paint pulsing and fluorescing with light and motion. With its foregrounding of female pleasure, it also subverts the narratives of heroic masculinity so often associated with the work of de Kooning and other Abstract Expressionists, taking gestural strokes and visceral colour to a new sensory arena.
Brown’s approach is equally indebted to the fleshy, sometimes violent visions of Francis Bacon, as well as to masters of the deeper art-historical past. Even as she explores fresh frontiers and new possibilities, Brown’s works speak in their language and seduce with their lessons. The Baroque hedonism of Rubens, the earthy carnivalesque of Bosch and Brueghel, and the chromatic drama and romance of Delacroix can all be glimpsed in the present work’s opulent, metamorphic surface. ‘The more I look at paintings,’ she has said, ‘the more I want to paint, the more engaged I become and the deeper and richer it gets’ (C. Brown, quoted in R. Enright, ‘Paint Whisperer: An Interview with Cecily Brown’, Border Crossings, no. 93, February 2005, p. 40).
While Single Room Furnished is unabashedly erotic, any narrative behind the scene remains ambiguous. The male figure is indistinct, the woman’s features unclear; anchored only by the bedframe, the setting itself becomes a whirlwind of abstract brushwork. It is a grand, passionate love affair with paint itself that takes centre stage. ‘I’m far more interested in a moment where figuration breaks down,’ Brown explains. ‘I usually describe it as breaking down rather than abstract because it really is this back and forth. Some works ... have far clearer graphic imagery and others really don’t. It’s always been important to me to have both, and some works walk the tight rope and have both within a painting’ (C. Brown, quoted in ‘Cecily Brown Interview: Take No Prisoners’, Louisiana Channel: Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, 3 November 2015). In the movie Single Room Furnished, the titular room is a claustrophobic space, reflecting the entrapment of a woman constrained by troubled relationships and a chaotic lifestyle. In Brown’s hands, it becomes a wonderland of painterly liberty, bodily momentum and sensory indulgence, drawing the viewer irresistibly into its heady splendours of vision and touch.