Untitled

This work, despite its relatively small scale, contains all of the intensely expressionist brushwork and bravura for which Brown’s large-scale paintings are admired. Brown was born in London in 1969 and graduated from the Slade School of Art in 1993. She left London for New York the following year, where she continues to live and work today. Her biological father, whom she first met in the later 1990s, was the English art historian and critic David Sylvester (1924–2001)—the great champion of the painters Francis Bacon and Willem de Kooning. Brown’s work deliberately plays, in part, with Bacon’s attraction to eroticism and death and de Kooning’s expressionistic fragmentation of bodies and space in paint.

The present work on paper represents the artist at the beginning of her mature style of part-abstract, part-representational riffs on historical painting. Here, a landscape seems to writhe with rosy pink flesh against a green and blue sky with gray storm clouds at center. Perhaps a battle scene or some fête champêtre gone awry, in Brown’s work the potential source for the subject is less important than the pleasure in lingering on her engagement with color and luscious brushstrokes.