November 10: Cecily Brown in conversation with Courtney J. Martin
Co-presented by Phaidon Press, 192 Books and Paula Cooper Gallery, Cecily Brown and Courtney J. Martin will discuss Brown’s new exhibition at the gallery as well as the publication of the artist’s first major monograph by Phaidon on Tuesday, November 10 at 1pm EST.
The live event will stream directly on this page on Tuesday, November 10 at 1pm EST. There is no login or rsvp required. A recording will be posted shortly afterwards. During the broadcast, please email your questions to evan@192books.com.
Phaidon Press, 192 Books and Paula Cooper Gallery invite you to a virtual conversation between artist Cecily Brown and Courtney J. Martin, Director of the Yale Center for British Art. The event is presented on the occasion of Brown’s one-person exhibition at the gallery—recently extended through December 12—and the publication of the artist’s first major monograph by Phaidon Press—for which Martin contributed an in-depth interview with the artist.
Cecily Brown, Phaidon Press, November 2020
Cecily Brown is the first—and highly anticipated—monograph on the artist. This richly illustrated publication includes an interview with Brown led by Courtney J. Martin, Director of the Yale Center for British Art in New Haven, and essays on her work by Jason Rosenfeld, Distinguished Chair and Professor of Art History at Marymount College in New York, and New York-based novelist Francine Prose. The title is part of Phaidon’s Contemporary Artists series—which offers comprehensive surveys of individual artists’ work and a range of art writing contributed by an international spectrum of authors, all leading figures in their fields. Celebrating 25 years, the Contemporary Artists series changed the way art is discussed by creating books in strict collaboration with living artists, underpinned by the voice of the artist themselves, cementing the books as essential resources for all those interested in contemporary art, at any level.
Cecily Brown, Paula Cooper Gallery, New York, NY (Oct 15 – Dec 12, 2020)
Cecily Brown’s one-person exhibition is on view at 524 West 26th Street in New York. Painted with a diverse palette, from warm polychrome hues to brooding velvety blacks, Brown’s work demonstrates a unique combination of abstraction and figuration. Begun in 2019, her earliest paintings in the exhibition evolved from her interest in the work of the seventeenth-century Flemish master Frans Snyders, with particular attention to his nature mortes and concert of birds paintings. Executed in grand scale, Brown’s forms seem to sporadically ignite across the canvas—gesturing toward vitality and sybarite worldly pleasures. Produced in the recent spring and summer months, a number of intimate easel-sized Bedroom Paintings mark a notable shift in tone. Depicting interior scenes of individuals or couples in erotic entanglements, the series introduces impassable straight lines and hyper-dense brushwork, suggesting a disquiet that belies their domestic subject matter and soft pastel hues. For more information on the exhibition, please click here.
Cecily Brown was born in London in 1969 and received her BA in Fine Arts from the Slade School of Art, London, in 1993. Her work is included in renowned public collections such as the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Brooklyn Museum, New York; National Gallery of Art,Washington, DC; and Tate Gallery, London. A major exhibition of her work is currently on view at Blenheim Palace in Oxfordshire, England through January 3, 2021. Other important one-person exhibitions include “Directions: Cecily Brown,” Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C. (2002); MACRO, Rome (2003); Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid (2004); Museum of Modern Art, Oxford (2005); Kunsthalle Mannheim (2005–06); Des Moines Art Center, Iowa (2006); Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (2006–07); Deichtorhallen, Hamburg (2009); “Based on a True Story,” Kestner Gesellschaft, Hannover (2010), which traveled to GEM, Museum of Contemporary Art, The Hague; Galleria Civica d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Turin (2014); “Rehearsal,” The Drawing Center, New York (2016), which traveled to Santa Barbara Museum of Art, CA; and “Where, When, How Often and with Whom,” Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Denmark (2018). Cecily Brown lives and works in New York.
Courtney J. Martin is the Director of the Yale Center for British Art (YCBA)in New Haven. Previously, she was the deputy director and chief curator at the Dia Art Foundation; an assistant professor in the History of Art and Architecture department at Brown University; an assistant professor in the History of Art department at Vanderbilt University; a chancellor’s postdoctoral fellow in the History of Art at the University of California, Berkeley; a fellow at the Getty Research Institute; and a Henry Moore Institute research fellow. She also worked in the media, arts, and culture unit of the Ford Foundation in New York. In 2015, she received an Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant. In 2012, Martin curated the exhibition Drop, Roll, Slide, Drip . . . Frank Bowling’s Poured Paintings 1973–1978 at Tate Britain. In 2014, she co-curated the group show Minimal Baroque: Post-Minimalism and Contemporary Art at Rønnebæksholm in Denmark. From 2008 to 2015, she co-led a research project on the Anglo-American art critic Lawrence Alloway at the Getty Research Institute and was co-editor of Lawrence Alloway: Critic and Curator (Getty Publications, 2015, winner of the 2016 Historians of British Art Book Award). In 2015, she curated an exhibition at the Dia Art Foundation focusing on the American painter Robert Ryman. At Dia, she also oversaw exhibitions of works by Dan Flavin, Sam Gilliam, Blinky Palermo, Dorothea Rockburne, Keith Sonnier, and Andy Warhol. She was editor of the book Four Generations: The Joyner Giuffrida Collection of Abstract Art (Gregory R. Miller & Co., 2016), surveying an important collection of modern and contemporary work by artists of African descent. As a graduate student in 2007, Martin contributed to the Center’s exhibition and publication Art and Emancipation in Jamaica: Isaac Mendes Belisario and his Worlds. She received a doctorate from Yale University for her research on twentieth-century British art and is the author of essays on Rasheed Araeen, Kader Attia, Rina Banerjee, Frank Bowling, Lara Favaretto, Leslie Hewitt, Asger Jorn, Wangechi Mutu, Ed Ruscha, and Yinka Shonibare CBE (RA).