And that’s how I’ve felt recently about the so-called black paintings. Sometimes you see something and you think, oh I’ve never really fully explored that, and there’s more territory for me to dig into. The older I get the more I dig into my own past, and use my own work as a source for new work. Why did you choose Black Painting 1 for this Phaidon/Artspace edition? , and accompanying limited edition Contemporary Artist Series book, the painter reflects on her personal motivations underlying this body of work, and explains why she chose the veryfirst work from the Black Paintings for this new edition, before going on to offer a few placement suggestions for any lucky buyers of the edition.Ĭecily Brown, New York, 2020. In this interview, conducted to coincide with the release of a Some of the most difficult I’ve made in a while.'

Her summer 2020 exhibition at Blenheim Palace in Great Britain received rave reviews, while her late 2020 show of what she refers to as 'bedroom paintings' created during lockdown, at Paula Cooper Gallery met with equally high praise though these paintings due to their size, and the conditions they were created under, were, she tells Artspace, ' Her work is included in public collections including: the Guggenheim, the Whitney and the Brooklyn Museums in New York the Louisiana Museum, Denmark, the National Gallery of Norway, the Tate Gallery, London, and the Foundation Louis Vuitton, Paris. Variably inspired by the fantastical visual worlds of Bosch and Goya, the organizational principles of Hogarth, and the gestural expressionism of de Kooning, Cecily Brown creates energetic and atmospheric canvases that often swirl with fragmented bodies.Ĭecily Brown has been based in New York since the 1990s, when she rose to prominence as a leading figure in the contemporary painterly canon. The respected art-history professor compares the break-up of the canvas to Dutch Golden Age landscapes of the seventeenth century, and Romantic Age of Revolution works such as Jacques-Louis David’sīrown’s paintings demonstrate a unique combination of abstraction and figuration, transcending classical notions of genre and narrative, by drawing on a wide range of art historical references. “Gravity presses her down into the lower third of the composition, and the upper two thirds are dominated by a black sky,' writes Jason Rosenfeld in Phaidon’s In each of the works, there is a recumbent nude on a bed, usually with the figure's head at left, and the body parallel to the picture plane.

Back in 2002, the British-born, New York-based, painter Cecily Brown began a new series of canvases - now known as the Black Paintings.

Their Precious Own by Lia Black