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拍品专文
With its luminous palette and sensuous, shape-shifting forms, The Haunter is a spectacular work by Cecily Brown. Verdant greens and icy blues collide with opulent tones of ruby and violet; warm ochres and peach are offset by startling white. Paint cavorts across the surface in wild, freewheeling streaks, its textures by turns viscous and translucent. Mercurial forms emerge in its wake: a hint of a tree branch, a flash of a figure, a spectral glimpse of flesh. Currently the subject of a major exhibition at the Serpentine Gallery, London, Brown plunders art history, literature and the depths of her own memory, allowing influences to flare and fade through her rollicking, improvisatory brushwork. Executed in 2010, the present work is an outstanding example of this approach, conjuring a convergence of the human, the natural and the supernatural. Brown has suggested that the painting relates to Francis Bacon’s portraits of Vincent van Gogh and Georg Baselitz’s fractured ‘heroes’, as well as the mystery novels of Shirley Jackson.
Brown studied at the Slade School of Fine Art in London during the early 1990s: a period that spawned the rise of ‘Cool Britannia’ and the Young British Artists. A year after graduating, she moved to New York, having spent six months at the Studio School during her degree. There, she found a climate more sympathetic to her love of painting: a passion cultivated through hours at the Tate and the National Gallery, where she had admired the works of Velázquez, Titian, Veronese, Beckmann and Degas. She was particularly inspired by the work of Francis Bacon, whom she had once met in person on a trip to the Royal Academy. Bacon had died in 1992, and living in New York allowed Brown to take stock of his influence from a distance. Conversely, the move brought her closer to the works of Willem de Kooning, whom she had previously only admired from afar. ‘I always felt like they [Bacon and de Kooning] were my painting grandfathers on either side of the Atlantic,’ she explains (C. Brown in conversation with H-U. Obrist, in Cecily Brown: Picture Making, exh. cat. Serpentine Gallery, London 2026, p. 69).
These influences are palpable in The Haunter. The painting tumbles freely between figurative and abstract dimensions: a by-product of Brown’s process, in which spontaneous brushstrokes build up in layers, occasionally converging into recognisable forms before being redirected into oblivion. Glimpses of reality flicker amid swathes of painterly illusion. Tantalising hints of stories and narratives lurk within the painting’s carnal textures. Bacon frequently pushed his subjects to the brink of abstraction; de Kooning, meanwhile, proclaimed that ‘flesh was the reason oil paint was invented’. Brown’s works, too, derive sensory pleasure from the frisson between form and formlessness. ‘Hers is an erotic maelstrom of brushstrokes ever welcoming to eyes in need of sensualisation,’ wrote Klaus Kertess in the catalogue for her 2012 exhibition in Rome, where the present work was shown. ‘Her recent paintings have turned up the volume of this tumultuous beauty’ (K. Kertess, ‘The Temptation of Cecily Brown’, in Cecily Brown, exh. cat. Gagosian Gallery, Rome 2012, p. 6).
The Haunter stems from a significant period in Brown’s practice. In 2008 she had moved into new spacious studio off Union Square; in 2009 she mounted her first comprehensive European retrospective at the Deichtorhallen, Hamburg. With the arrival of her baby daughter that year, Brown shifted towards a new muted palette of earthy hues. By 2010, however, she had begun to reintegrate more vibrant colours once more, looking back to the vivid pinks and greens of her early oeuvre. She has suggested that The Haunter calls to mind canvases such as Spree (1999), in which luminous bodily forms writhe and intermingle amid bright, leafy landscapes. At the same time, the painting also looks forwards, its title anticipating her more recent preoccupations with the dark undercurrents of Victorian fairy stories and cautionary tales. This sense of recurring reverie lies at the heart of Brown’s practice: the artist has described her work as an attempt to visualise the feeling of repeatedly grasping for something just out of reach. Such dynamics are borne out in the present work, its surface haunted by spectres and sensations.
Brown studied at the Slade School of Fine Art in London during the early 1990s: a period that spawned the rise of ‘Cool Britannia’ and the Young British Artists. A year after graduating, she moved to New York, having spent six months at the Studio School during her degree. There, she found a climate more sympathetic to her love of painting: a passion cultivated through hours at the Tate and the National Gallery, where she had admired the works of Velázquez, Titian, Veronese, Beckmann and Degas. She was particularly inspired by the work of Francis Bacon, whom she had once met in person on a trip to the Royal Academy. Bacon had died in 1992, and living in New York allowed Brown to take stock of his influence from a distance. Conversely, the move brought her closer to the works of Willem de Kooning, whom she had previously only admired from afar. ‘I always felt like they [Bacon and de Kooning] were my painting grandfathers on either side of the Atlantic,’ she explains (C. Brown in conversation with H-U. Obrist, in Cecily Brown: Picture Making, exh. cat. Serpentine Gallery, London 2026, p. 69).
These influences are palpable in The Haunter. The painting tumbles freely between figurative and abstract dimensions: a by-product of Brown’s process, in which spontaneous brushstrokes build up in layers, occasionally converging into recognisable forms before being redirected into oblivion. Glimpses of reality flicker amid swathes of painterly illusion. Tantalising hints of stories and narratives lurk within the painting’s carnal textures. Bacon frequently pushed his subjects to the brink of abstraction; de Kooning, meanwhile, proclaimed that ‘flesh was the reason oil paint was invented’. Brown’s works, too, derive sensory pleasure from the frisson between form and formlessness. ‘Hers is an erotic maelstrom of brushstrokes ever welcoming to eyes in need of sensualisation,’ wrote Klaus Kertess in the catalogue for her 2012 exhibition in Rome, where the present work was shown. ‘Her recent paintings have turned up the volume of this tumultuous beauty’ (K. Kertess, ‘The Temptation of Cecily Brown’, in Cecily Brown, exh. cat. Gagosian Gallery, Rome 2012, p. 6).
The Haunter stems from a significant period in Brown’s practice. In 2008 she had moved into new spacious studio off Union Square; in 2009 she mounted her first comprehensive European retrospective at the Deichtorhallen, Hamburg. With the arrival of her baby daughter that year, Brown shifted towards a new muted palette of earthy hues. By 2010, however, she had begun to reintegrate more vibrant colours once more, looking back to the vivid pinks and greens of her early oeuvre. She has suggested that The Haunter calls to mind canvases such as Spree (1999), in which luminous bodily forms writhe and intermingle amid bright, leafy landscapes. At the same time, the painting also looks forwards, its title anticipating her more recent preoccupations with the dark undercurrents of Victorian fairy stories and cautionary tales. This sense of recurring reverie lies at the heart of Brown’s practice: the artist has described her work as an attempt to visualise the feeling of repeatedly grasping for something just out of reach. Such dynamics are borne out in the present work, its surface haunted by spectres and sensations.