Photo By Gail
For more than 25 years, Cecily Brown has transfixed viewers with vivid color, bravura, brushwork, and complex narratives that relate to some of Western art history’s grandest and oldest themes. After moving to New York from London in the 1990s, she also helped revive painting for a new generation at a moment when critics and artists were questioning its relevance. Continue reading Modern Art Monday Presents: Cecily Brown, Selfie
Photo By Gail
This small-scale triptych demonstrates Cecily Brown’s characteristic use of highly expressionistic and densely layered brushstrokes that tend to blur distinctions between the representational and the abstract. Initially the painting appears devoid of recognizable subject matter, yet closer inspection reveals hints of bodily fragments entangled among lushly-rendered landscapes. There is a shared materiality between flesh and paint, which Brown suggestively exploits for both optic and erotic charge. Like the title, Fair of Face, Full of Woe (2008), which references an English fortunetelling nursery rhyme, the painting exists in constant flux, it’s visual fate determined by each new viewer.
Photographed in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in Manhattan.
All Photos By Gail
Artist Chuck Close is renowned for his highly inventive investigations into how we process information. Celebrated internationally, Close uses the absolute minimum amount of information necessary to render likenesses. In the new works for his sixteenth exhibition with Pace, entitled Red Yellow Blue , Close continues his involvement with the grid as an organizing device, creating full-color paintings out of only cyan, magenta, and yellow pigments, and layering colors in singular brushstrokes; applying multiple thin washes of red, yellow and blue paint in each cell of the grid, until they accumulate into extravagant full-color images. Continue reading Chuck Close, Red Yellow Blue at Pace Gallery