Cultured Magazine

June/July 2015

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152 CULTURED he light on Manhattan's West Side is very different from that of the East Side. The closer one gets to the Hudson River, the more intense it becomes; the brights get brighter, the dark gets darker. It's as though the contrast were turned up on the world. This used to be Cecily Brown's light. "I really miss it over here," says the British-born painter, who moved her studio to Union Square from the Meatpacking District four years ago. But on a bright Friday morning, she was back in the old neighborhood—"where I used to recover from my wild and misspent youth," she recalls—to unveil an exhibition of small paintings at Maccarone gallery in the West Village. The morning, like the show, seemed to catch Brown at a moment of reflective but keenly optimistic transition. "It's a brand-new space for me, with different light, in a different part of town," she says. "It seemed like an exciting idea." Brown has been a major fixture in the art world since, more or less, the moment she emerged on the scene in the mid- to late 90s. At the time, the advent of the Young British Artists (YBA)—including figures like Sarah Lucas and Damien Hirst— had conditioned American audiences to think of U.K. imports as high-octane conceptual provocateurs. Brown, slightly younger than the YBAs and trained partially in America at New York's Studio School, confounded such expectations. "A lot of people in my generation moved away from the canvas, the rectangle," says Brown. "It's a bit old-fashioned to make flat things hanging on a wall. I had my moment of rejecting all that, but I just wasn't good at it. I kept coming back to painting." That, more or less, is where she's remained; and at 46, Brown stands as perhaps the foremost living exponent of robust, painterly abstraction, albeit of a highly rarified sort. "I always feel like the word 'expressionist' is misleading," says the artist. "Expressive of what?" she asks. From the outset of her career, the bold forms, rich colors and lavish brushwork of Brown's paintings have invited comparisons to both mid-century Abstract Expressionism and to the men —Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning and Franz Kline in whose "floods of paint," the poet James Schuyler once wrote, "in whose crashing surf we all scramble." Brown, though not untouched by those waves, has tended to remain calmly on shore. Her work has always tempered AbEx gesturalism with a certain remove, a finely calibrated yet indeterminate gap that separates her own inner life from the emotional content of the T

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