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Lot Essay
In Things Could be Different, But They’re Not (2007), Cecily Brown revels in the rich fluidity of paint. Across a mesmerising diptych, impasto licks and daubs intersect with glorious, gluttonous strokes and delicate ribbons of marbled paint, the trails of a thickly laden brush. The teeming canvases invite slow looking. Elements of figuration—suggestive of limbs and bodies—glint out amid the fray. Each stroke of paint is like a loose thread, tempting the viewer to delve deeper into a chromatic chasm of blues, coral pinks and shadowy hues. Brown is undoubtedly one of the most celebrated artists working today. Marking three decades of restless innovation and insertion into the canon of art history, in recent years she has been the subject of several acclaimed mid-career retrospectives, including Cecily Brown: Death and the Maid at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2023), and Cecily Brown: Themes and Variations, which will open this March at the Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia, having travelled from the Dallas Museum of Art.
Brown was born in London, and her paintings invoke the city’s tradition of flesh: Lucian Freud’s indulgent impasto and Francis Bacon’s fragmentary bodies. Since 1994, the year she graduated from the Slade School of Fine Art, Brown has been based in New York, and the inheritance of American Abstract Expressionists such as Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock can be felt in the flurries of paint which unfold across her canvases. Brown looks also to the Old Masters: her recent retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art considered the vanitas motif within her oeuvre—her paintings are sometimes redolent of opulent tablescapes, heaped with decadent excess. Surpassing both figuration and abstraction, Brown occupies a space in between. The present work recalls Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s Wimmelbilder, or ‘busy pictures,’ swarming compositions which similarly extend the act of looking. Its intimate scale is almost devotional. Across both canvases, heads reminiscent of putti—mediums of love and lust both virtuous and profane—survey the swarming melee.
Brown has often lifted her titles from song lyrics and vintage Hollywood movies. The title of Things Could be Different, But They’re Not is a lyric from ‘The Past is a Grotesque Animal’, a rousing psychedelic pop anthem by the American band, of Montreal. The song brims with evocative imagery of torn hearts and bodies, the transportive thrill of a carnal lust which cannot endure in the real world. With the bittersweet clarity of hindsight, it articulates the question of what might have been: ‘We want our film to be beautiful, not realistic. Perceive me in the radiance of terror dreams,’ beckons lead singer Kevin Barnes. With its poignant title and twin canvases, the present work imagines the co-existence of multiple and diverging denouements. Just as each choice in life involves acknowledgment of the path not taken, each stroke of Things Could be Different, But They’re Not leads the viewer towards one interpretation amid many. To return anew to Brown’s rich, metamorphic painting is—with each visit—to reach another.
Brown was born in London, and her paintings invoke the city’s tradition of flesh: Lucian Freud’s indulgent impasto and Francis Bacon’s fragmentary bodies. Since 1994, the year she graduated from the Slade School of Fine Art, Brown has been based in New York, and the inheritance of American Abstract Expressionists such as Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock can be felt in the flurries of paint which unfold across her canvases. Brown looks also to the Old Masters: her recent retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art considered the vanitas motif within her oeuvre—her paintings are sometimes redolent of opulent tablescapes, heaped with decadent excess. Surpassing both figuration and abstraction, Brown occupies a space in between. The present work recalls Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s Wimmelbilder, or ‘busy pictures,’ swarming compositions which similarly extend the act of looking. Its intimate scale is almost devotional. Across both canvases, heads reminiscent of putti—mediums of love and lust both virtuous and profane—survey the swarming melee.
Brown has often lifted her titles from song lyrics and vintage Hollywood movies. The title of Things Could be Different, But They’re Not is a lyric from ‘The Past is a Grotesque Animal’, a rousing psychedelic pop anthem by the American band, of Montreal. The song brims with evocative imagery of torn hearts and bodies, the transportive thrill of a carnal lust which cannot endure in the real world. With the bittersweet clarity of hindsight, it articulates the question of what might have been: ‘We want our film to be beautiful, not realistic. Perceive me in the radiance of terror dreams,’ beckons lead singer Kevin Barnes. With its poignant title and twin canvases, the present work imagines the co-existence of multiple and diverging denouements. Just as each choice in life involves acknowledgment of the path not taken, each stroke of Things Could be Different, But They’re Not leads the viewer towards one interpretation amid many. To return anew to Brown’s rich, metamorphic painting is—with each visit—to reach another.