Cecily Brown (EN)

Cecily Brown, born in London in 1969, lives and works in New York and her paintings are included in numerous public collections throughout the United States, among which the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Gagosian Gallery and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, and at the Tate Gallery, in London, as well as in many private art collections.

She has received a lot of critical attention and GAM in Turin is now hosting her first solo exhibition in an Italian museum since 2003, featuring some fifty works including paintings, works on paper, gouache and watercolors as well as seven monotypes, coming from the artist's studio and from some of the richest European and American art collections.

At first glance Cecily Brown’s painting looks like an enormous coloured anthill, with thousands of insects following each other, climbing over each other, hiding and reappearing, leaving colourful traces of their movements. It is like a sort of bottleneck of signs where every presence is overlaid by a living pulsing mass that absorbs any image and any sign.

Cecily Brown’s exploration proceeds along two parallel paths between the conceptual analysis of the visual narrative and the linguistic structure capable of supporting this process, between areas of sophisticated visionary quality and a muscular vocabulary of signs and colours. Her paintings are rich of cultured references to the history of art with countless echoes of images by the grand masters.

Turin, GAM, October 2014 – February 2015