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Lot Essay
"I'm obsessed with trying to paint flesh. I've always thought that flesh was the reason to paint. Apparently, de Kooning said the same thing hundreds of years ago. All the art I've ever been drawn to has the body in it." (Cecily Brown quoted in D. Kazanjian "Fleshing it Out", Vogue, February 1999, p. 252)
There exists a fitting postmodern ironic tone to the comment of Cecily Brown, which informs her work and keeps her approach to painting fresh. The artist at once acknowledges her debt to the history of painting, most noticeably citing de Kooning's influence, as well as Abstract Expressionism in general. Throughout her career Brown has been interested in human physicality, which inevitably leads to the subject of sex. Initially Brown focused on the sexual promiscuity of bunnies, in many incarnations, to humans. Most recently her paintings border on the purely abstract. Untitled (Trapeze) is from a series of work Brown executed in 1997, in which the artist tapped into the energy and chaos of Abstract Expressionism to represent the equally frenetic experience of sex.
"The erect penis is underrepresented in art, you know," Cecily Brown says, "especially by women artists. It's a beautiful thing to paint, and so loaded psychologically. It's miraculous visual event, the opposite of Courbet's Origin of the World. I think it would be much harder for a man to paint this way now. It used to be said that men painted with their dicks. I'm kind of in that tradition, except I don't know whose I'm painting with." (Cecily Brown quoted in D. Kazanjian "Fleshing it Out", Vogue, February 1999, p. 252)
Untitled (Trapeze) undulates and swirls across the canvas emulating the motions of sex while also distorting it. Sex is not represented to titillate our more perverse fantasies but is used as a symbol, the absolute expression of flesh. Sexual content in Brown's work is controlled by the artist's style of painting and therefore Untitled (Trapeze) becomes a complete visceral experience that is both pure painting and sex. Brown says,
"I want to transcribe the feeling of heat inside your body, inside your mouth, the feeling of skin on skin, and flesh and grasping; painting is a metaphor for sex. So I want it caressing; I want it brutal and tender and everything at once." (D. Kazanjian, p. 253)
There exists a fitting postmodern ironic tone to the comment of Cecily Brown, which informs her work and keeps her approach to painting fresh. The artist at once acknowledges her debt to the history of painting, most noticeably citing de Kooning's influence, as well as Abstract Expressionism in general. Throughout her career Brown has been interested in human physicality, which inevitably leads to the subject of sex. Initially Brown focused on the sexual promiscuity of bunnies, in many incarnations, to humans. Most recently her paintings border on the purely abstract. Untitled (Trapeze) is from a series of work Brown executed in 1997, in which the artist tapped into the energy and chaos of Abstract Expressionism to represent the equally frenetic experience of sex.
"The erect penis is underrepresented in art, you know," Cecily Brown says, "especially by women artists. It's a beautiful thing to paint, and so loaded psychologically. It's miraculous visual event, the opposite of Courbet's Origin of the World. I think it would be much harder for a man to paint this way now. It used to be said that men painted with their dicks. I'm kind of in that tradition, except I don't know whose I'm painting with." (Cecily Brown quoted in D. Kazanjian "Fleshing it Out", Vogue, February 1999, p. 252)
Untitled (Trapeze) undulates and swirls across the canvas emulating the motions of sex while also distorting it. Sex is not represented to titillate our more perverse fantasies but is used as a symbol, the absolute expression of flesh. Sexual content in Brown's work is controlled by the artist's style of painting and therefore Untitled (Trapeze) becomes a complete visceral experience that is both pure painting and sex. Brown says,
"I want to transcribe the feeling of heat inside your body, inside your mouth, the feeling of skin on skin, and flesh and grasping; painting is a metaphor for sex. So I want it caressing; I want it brutal and tender and everything at once." (D. Kazanjian, p. 253)