The GEM Museum of Contemporary Art in the Netherlands presents Cecily Brown Solo Exhibition on view now through 27/2/2011.
The new work of New York-based artist Cecily Brown (b.1969) features a medley of grey, red, orange and earth colours applied with vigorous gestures to canvases of many different sizes. Although this winter’s show at the GEM museum of contemporary art is Cecily Brown’s first ever solo exhibition in the Netherlands, in America she has for years been regarded as a leading artist of our day. Her work features in top collections like those of the Guggenheim Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York and Tate Modern in London.
Brown grew up in England. She is the daughter of author Shena Mackay and well-known British art critic David Sylvester. Her father played a particularly important part in her early life as an artist, fostering her love of art by introducing her to the works of Francis Bacon and Picasso. Brown’s current sources of inspiration include old masters like Rubens, Poussin and Titian, as well as modern artists like Bacon, De Kooning and Arshile Gorky. With the first she shares her love of the human body and with the second her taste for large canvases and an expressive style. In England she felt out of place at the start of her career by the sensationalism of the Young British Artists (including Damien Hirst), who were then the movers and shakers in the British art world. There seemed to be little place for her kind of painting. In 1996 she moved to New York, where she found that – precisely because she was an outsider: young, female and foreign – she could win rapid success in the male-dominated world of abstract expressionism. Where the abstract expressionism of Pollock and De Kooning is rough and macho, Brown’s is sensual and sophisticated.
Image: Gemeentemuseum Den Haag
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