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拍品专文
Enigmatic, energetic and erotically charged, Girl Trouble is an exemplary instance of Cecily Brown’s incandescent, supple practice. Expansive in scale, it depicts a mysterious scene in which abstract passages of color solidify into figurative details. Brown executes her picture in spirited, almost furious brushstrokes, using a palette of blazing reds, fulgent oranges and lambent yellows: an arrangement of color as infernal as it is carnal. In the painting’s lower right, a nude woman gazes into a mirror that casts her reflection. Above her, a wispy red line suggests the contours of a second figure, whose outline is evinced by a fleshly purple line in the mirror. Above them both, curling reams of paint intimate the muscular arms of a standing figure, bent as if to touch their own hair. To the left side of the canvas, which contains patches of calmer greys and pinks redolent of skin, the action is more equivocal still, yet retains a vivid, tactile quality. Named, characteristically for Brown, after a romantic comedy from Hollywood’s Golden Age, Girl Trouble is a cornucopian painting, encouraging prolonged engagement with its minutiae. Though suffused with sensuality, Brown leaves the interactions between her characters opaque, allowing the viewer to project their own readings on her tableau. “The viewer,” says Brown, “is a living, breathing being that moves about in space and I want the painting to be experienced like that. I want my painting to imitate life in that way” (C. Brown, ‘I take things too far when painting,’ The Observer, 20 September 2009).
Brown possesses a rich knowledge of art history, spanning the Renaissance to the present day, and her oeuvre is saturated with references to works past, remade in her own visceral style. In using a mirror to reflect a nude, for instance, Girl Trouble can be placed in a lineage that includes both Diego Velazquez’s sumptuous Rokeby Venus (1647-51) and Pablo Picasso’s The Mirror (1932). The exposed muscles of the standing figure are redolent of the male nudes of the great French romantic Eugène Delacroix, who depicted idealized, heroic bodies with a dramatic sense of motion. And the grey rhombus streaked with pink on the canvas’s left shares form and hue with the skates immortalized in still-life over three centuries by Jean-Bapiste-Siméon Chardin, James Ensor and Chaïm Soutine, the latter of whom pioneered the tempestuous impasto that is one of Brown’s hallmarks.
Yet despite these echoes, Brown’s arrangement remains as distinct as it does mysterious. “Painting,” she has said, “is closest to poetry of all the arts: not being able to explain something, why does one thing sound so great next to another? You can’t put your finger on it, that’s what my work’s about” (C. Brown, quoted in J. Wullschlager, "Lunch with the FT: Cecily Brown," Financial Times, 10 June 2016). In making the numinous interplay of paint a chief concern of her work, Brown stands in dialogue with the legacy of Abstract Expressionism. While studying at the Slade School of Fine Arts in London, where she won first prize in Britain’s National Competition of Student Artists, Brown found her devotion for painting out of step with the conceptual and installation artists then dominant in her home country. She consequently moved in the mid-1990s to New York: the city that had in the 1940s and 1950s been Abstract Expressionism’s nucleus. Brown’s works revive this movement’s virtuosity, intensity and passion for the expressive capabilities of paint. They also parallel its willingness–demonstrated by action painters such as Jackson Pollock–to embrace spontaneity, and to allow pieces to develop through the act of painting rather than predetermined design. “I take all my queues from the paint, so it’s a total back and forth between my will and the painting directly what to do next” (C. Brown in D. Peck, "New York Minute: Cecily Brown," AnOther, 14 September 2012). In her oblique forms and spirited coloration, there are elements of the influential Arshile Gorky, while her fervid, gestural brushstrokes draw on the legacy of Willem de Kooning, who like Brown exploited the tension between abstraction and figuration.
Abstract Expressionism, with a few exceptions, was largely the demesne of male painters. After exhibiting his seminal Women series (1950-1953) of semi-nude portraits in New York’s Sidney Janis Gallery, some critics accused Willem de Kooning of misogyny and obscenity; de Kooning responded, “flesh is the reason oil paint was invented.” Brown both provides a counterpoint to de Kooning’s male gaze and a continuation of his mantra and medium. “Oil paint,” Brown has explained, “very easily suggests the bodily fluids and flesh” (C. Brown, quoted in G. Wood, "I like the cheap and nasty," The Observer, 12 June 2005). Brown goes further in wholeheartedly championing the power of art to not just capture but embody life’s physicality and emotional tumult, with a vigor and vivacity all Brown’s own. “Painting and sex,” she says, “have things in common, you have a frustration when you’re not doing it, it’s a physical urge that can’t be fulfilled by anything else” (C. Brown, quoted in J. Wullschlager, ibid.).
Brown possesses a rich knowledge of art history, spanning the Renaissance to the present day, and her oeuvre is saturated with references to works past, remade in her own visceral style. In using a mirror to reflect a nude, for instance, Girl Trouble can be placed in a lineage that includes both Diego Velazquez’s sumptuous Rokeby Venus (1647-51) and Pablo Picasso’s The Mirror (1932). The exposed muscles of the standing figure are redolent of the male nudes of the great French romantic Eugène Delacroix, who depicted idealized, heroic bodies with a dramatic sense of motion. And the grey rhombus streaked with pink on the canvas’s left shares form and hue with the skates immortalized in still-life over three centuries by Jean-Bapiste-Siméon Chardin, James Ensor and Chaïm Soutine, the latter of whom pioneered the tempestuous impasto that is one of Brown’s hallmarks.
Yet despite these echoes, Brown’s arrangement remains as distinct as it does mysterious. “Painting,” she has said, “is closest to poetry of all the arts: not being able to explain something, why does one thing sound so great next to another? You can’t put your finger on it, that’s what my work’s about” (C. Brown, quoted in J. Wullschlager, "Lunch with the FT: Cecily Brown," Financial Times, 10 June 2016). In making the numinous interplay of paint a chief concern of her work, Brown stands in dialogue with the legacy of Abstract Expressionism. While studying at the Slade School of Fine Arts in London, where she won first prize in Britain’s National Competition of Student Artists, Brown found her devotion for painting out of step with the conceptual and installation artists then dominant in her home country. She consequently moved in the mid-1990s to New York: the city that had in the 1940s and 1950s been Abstract Expressionism’s nucleus. Brown’s works revive this movement’s virtuosity, intensity and passion for the expressive capabilities of paint. They also parallel its willingness–demonstrated by action painters such as Jackson Pollock–to embrace spontaneity, and to allow pieces to develop through the act of painting rather than predetermined design. “I take all my queues from the paint, so it’s a total back and forth between my will and the painting directly what to do next” (C. Brown in D. Peck, "New York Minute: Cecily Brown," AnOther, 14 September 2012). In her oblique forms and spirited coloration, there are elements of the influential Arshile Gorky, while her fervid, gestural brushstrokes draw on the legacy of Willem de Kooning, who like Brown exploited the tension between abstraction and figuration.
Abstract Expressionism, with a few exceptions, was largely the demesne of male painters. After exhibiting his seminal Women series (1950-1953) of semi-nude portraits in New York’s Sidney Janis Gallery, some critics accused Willem de Kooning of misogyny and obscenity; de Kooning responded, “flesh is the reason oil paint was invented.” Brown both provides a counterpoint to de Kooning’s male gaze and a continuation of his mantra and medium. “Oil paint,” Brown has explained, “very easily suggests the bodily fluids and flesh” (C. Brown, quoted in G. Wood, "I like the cheap and nasty," The Observer, 12 June 2005). Brown goes further in wholeheartedly championing the power of art to not just capture but embody life’s physicality and emotional tumult, with a vigor and vivacity all Brown’s own. “Painting and sex,” she says, “have things in common, you have a frustration when you’re not doing it, it’s a physical urge that can’t be fulfilled by anything else” (C. Brown, quoted in J. Wullschlager, ibid.).