Delia Brown “Demoiselles d’ Instagram”

Tibor de Nagy Gallery

[Image: Delia Brown #roséallday (2018) oil on canvas, 74 x 60 in.]

This event has ended.

Tibor de Nagy Gallery presents a show of new paintings by Delia Brown, this will be Brown’s first exhibition at the gallery, and her first in New York City since 2010. Brown currently lives and works in Los Angeles.

The exhibition Demoiselles d’ Instagram, comprises six paintings, in which Brown explores how our high-tech culture encourages and facilitates a preoccupation with our own image, and shines a light on the flattening of our relationship to the larger world we inhabit. Specifically, Brown mines the “selfie” sub-genres of the mirror selfie and the gym selfie, in which the subject’s smartphone is included in the image. Brown alludes to the ways self-centered “self-improvement” (through diet, yoga, body-building, etc.) have come to replace other ennobling pursuits that would prioritize our inter-connectedness.

This exhibition marks a stylistic shift for the artist. Brown is well known for a more refined and incisive realism, based on photographs she stages and shoots herself. Her new works’ looser, more adventurous paint handling comes out of a particular personal and cultural context. In 2009, the artist moved from New York back to her native Los Angeles, and encountered numerous life-altering challenges, including the death of her father and a battle with cancer (she is currently in remission). She was jolted into action by the 2016 election and became active as an organizer in the resistance movement. But like many who feel overwhelmed by the political climate in our country, this focus left Brown in a state of constant anxiety. Doing away with photographic source-material — and allowing her compositions to evolve intuitively, through the build-up of painterly experimentation — proved a welcome respite from her angst. In her words, “The paintings gave me problems…formal problems…problems which I could actually solve. And that gave me a sense of satisfaction, when otherwise all I was feeling was powerless.”

Brown has always worked in thematic series; her past areas of inquiry have included affluence, indulgence, and indolence. She often appeared as a character in her own paintings, keeping the point of view personal and passionately ambivalent, always implicating herself in the critique. The artist both identified with and was troubled by her subjects and their aspirations. This impulse and dynamic continues in her new work.

Since receiving her MFA from UCLA in 2000, Brown has had numerous solo shows at D’Amelio Terras, Margo Leavin Gallery, and Baldwin Gallery, among others. Her work is in the permanent collections of The Los Angeles County Museum of Art, The Seattle Art Museum, and The Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive. She is currently included in the exhibition “Soft Corners” at Richard Telles Gallery, Los Angeles.