Cecily Brown’s young lovers melt into the foliage, fused into the landscape in the heat of a moment. Everything about Brown’s painting erupts with sex appeal: from the soft-porn pastel colors to the oily-wet malleability of the surface. Cecily Brown knows that desire lies in the flirtation: amid her fervent gestural abstraction, just the glimpse of suggestion is enough.
The sensuality of this painting lies not just in the partially seen couple in the foliage, but also in the thickly applied oil paint itself. The marks are voluptuous and smeary, suggestive of bodily fluids and flesh, the pink, unguent colors of the lovers melding with the earthy tones of the tree branches. Cecily Brown applies her pigment in loose, slippery strokes with a rounded brush in Teenage Wildlife, in which she raises questions about the possibly illicit nature of the couple’s sexual pleasure and the viewer’s voyeurism...
In this painting she refers to a classical arcadia, a subject popular since antiquity, in which beautiful nymphs are portrayed in lush forest settings. Here, the paint enmeshes the couple in a bucolic landscape, rendering them in close harmony with their surroundings. Ultimately it is this relationship between the figure and the landscape that remains the most compelling aspect of Brown’s paintings. The naked couple in Teenage Wildlife twist and evaporate into the feral congestion of branches while in other paintings it only takes the tiniest flick of paint, discerned through the untamed foliage for the erotic narratives to begin forming in the mind. Yet these stories are always sidelined by the sheer force of the paint. Luscious, filthy and teeming with color, nothing in Brown’s paintings remain sedentary, her pictures are constantly on the move and open to suggestions.
Brown's work has appeared at the Whitney Biennial 2004 in New York, The Triumph of Painting at the Saatchi Gallery, London and Greater New York at P.S. 1, New York. She has exhibited at galleries and museums including Contemporary Fine Arts in Berlin, Germany, MACRO in Rome, Italy and Museum der Moderna, Salzburg, Austria. She is represented by Gagosian Gallery, New York.
Cecily Brown's paintings combine figuration and abstraction. Expanding the tradition of abstract expressionism, she draws her influences from painters such as Willem de Kooning. Her paintings also recall the works of Philip Guston and the Bay Area Figurative School of the 1950s and 1960s. Brown often titles her paintings after classic Hollywood films.