Cecily Brown

Long live painting! Cecily Brown’s latest work, shown at Contemporary Fine Arts Berlin from August 28 to September 26, 2015, is brought together in this elegant volume. It is less Cecily Brown’s actual painting process that Terry R. Myers, professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, acknowledges most; rather, in relation to her work, he demonstrates in a quite intriguing yet simple way the validity of his thesis of the continuing influence of painting in contemporary art. Cecily Brown is his proof that the end of painting has been heralded not only prematurely, but most notably based on the wrong prerequisites. The term “swipe”, associated with Willem de Kooning’s work and used ever since, has also been also applied to Cecily Brown’s oil paintings. Terry R. Myers, however, sees the back view of a nude in the painting “Torch” and the salient angle of the leg in “The Triumph of Virtue” as unbeatable evidence as to why “by the way, painting has always been one of the best places to use virtuosity to be anything, anything, but virtuous.” Cecily Brown »remains concerned with how to paint the figure today, how to keep it in the painting when it is under pressure«. She has always not only adhered to de Kooning’s so-called swipe, but also to the ‘slipping glimpse’. Yet, in her new images, Cecily Brown »has reached a place where it is her own history that determines the terms of recalling other moments in painting's history. So de Kooning has become an ally rather than the father to be killed. It may just be that Brown is the beneficiary of having just enough distance from him, a space that has been impacted by a crucial series of struggles between then and now.« That probably explains why the new paintings by Cecily Brown »come across as the most comfortable ones she has made.«Exhibition: CFA Contemporary Fine Arts Berlin, 28/8–26/9/2015