Cecily Brown

Deeply engaged in art history, Cecily Brown's Sentimental Fool from the Black Painting Series (named after Goya's Black Paintings), utilises and evokes without hubris the techniques and subject matter of some of the most prominent canonical painters and places them in a contemporary context. Trained at the Slade School in London in the early 1990s, today, Cecily Brown is regarded as one of the most acclaimed young contemporary artists, best recognised for her highly painterly, expressive and sexually charged large-scale oil paintings which convey painterly process as being an intensely physical act. Clearly influenced by the works of Willem de Kooning who famously declared that flesh is the reason oil painting was invented, Cecily Brown has continuously maintained an expressive interest in the subject of the nude, layering paint upon paint, creating in her own words "something that's both visually exciting but loaded with meaning and rich and layered" (Miranda Millwards, Cecily Brown Paintings, Oxford 2005, n.p.). Her approximation of the sensuality of pigment with the carnal sexuality is reminiscent of Gustave Courbet's groundbreaking handling of flesh in works such as La Femme au Perroquet, 1866.

Neither purely figurative nor wholly abstract Sentimental Fool cleverly meshes a highly erotic scene with layers of colour and abstraction rendering it impossible to pigeon-hole the approach of this totally innovative artist. True to her independent and unique style, in this work Brown explores the relationship between the audience and the painting. With her animated brushwork and swaths of pigment which create something seemingly abstract, the artist alludes to rather than overtly depicts an erotic scene, altering the role of the viewer to that of a voyeur, compelling them to truly delve into the painting and in doing so become fully engaged in the sensuality of the scene. In all her works, Cecily Brown passionately expresses the extent to which the physical act of painting is a complex and sensual experience for the artist and constantly strives to induce this common sensation from her audience, thus uniting artist and viewer.