NYAB Event - Cecily Brown “The English Garden”

Cecily Brown “The English Garden”

Maccarone

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Maccarone present “The English Garden,” an exhibition of Cecily Brown’s intimately scaled paintings organized by novelist and art writer Jim Lewis.

Made between 2005 and 2014, these seldom seen paintings were made concurrently with Brown’s more familiar large-scale canvases and mirror shifts in her work over the past decade. They are presented here for the first time in an exhibition of their own.

Having lived with one of Brown’s paintings for years, Lewis has grown increasingly fascinated by the power of the artist’s smaller works and was moved to suggest a show devoted exclusively to them. Integral to Brown’s practice for the past ten years, these pieces are not sketches, but autonomous works. In this scale they are more interior, diaristic, and confessional — full of secretive notations and private thoughts. The process of making them, too, is more intimate for the painter: Brown creates them while seated instead of standing, using the wrist not the arm. The paintings are gardens rather than landscapes.

In tandem with “The English Garden,” Lewis and Brown have co-authored a limited run artists’ book of the same name. Lewis has contributed a short story informed by Brown’s paintings, rather than a traditional essay (as he did for the artist’s 2006 Essl Museum catalog). Brown’s longtime interests — National Trust gardens, bunnies, and troubled paradises — are present in Lewis’s tale of a young Alexander Pope scholar’s hallucinatory research trip to the gardens of a neglected English manor. All is not well in the English Garden.