Issue link: https://read.dmtmag.com/i/518559
154 CULTURED paintings. Her work is "more calculated, hot and cold," as she puts it. "Yes, there's fast motion, but it's very knowing," she says, though what precisely the paintings know is always a little uncertain, perhaps even to Brown herself. This, again, has tended to stymie the assumptions of critics. Comparing her to the artists of the past is actually somewhat beside the point, and even from one painting to another—or with the same painting, seen at different times of day or in different places—her work can appear beguilingly different, mutable and sui generis. The current show at Maccarone seems, at first, like a hesitation in the artist's trajectory. The paintings are intimately small—most of them about a foot square—almost like studies for the heroic canvasses on which Brown has built her reputation. But in fact, Brown has been making work on this scale for at least a decade, and is only exhibiting them now at the suggestion of friend and novelist Jim Lewis, who has owned one such piece for years and thought they deserved a show of their own. In conjunction with the exhibition, Lewis has produced a book, "The English Garden," from which the show takes its name; the short story, about a student of 18th century landscape on an increasingly strange research expedition, echoes some of the sensibility of Brown's paintings without offering anything like a pat narrative to explain the work. "Jim kept saying, 'I don't want the paintings to be illustrations to the story!'" recalls the artist, who instead sees a pleasingly vague relationship between text and picture. "I like that people might do a double-take, not quite sure what they're looking at; it's a level of uncertainty." Brown herself, though hardly uncertain, is moving into somewhat uncharted territory at the moment. "The English Garden" marks her first show in New York since departing Gagosian Gallery, which represented her work for 15 years. The departure was amicable, the artist says, and part of a larger trend. "A lot of artists are becoming more protective of their work," she says. "There are these shifts in the art world now where artists are expected to show in more than one gallery." As the Maccarone show bears out, what Brown is moving toward isn't necessarily a new approach, but a change of scenery—a chance to let her work be seen by a different audience, from a different angle and in a different light. The paintings are intimately small, almost like studies for the far larger, heroic canvases on which Brown has built her reputation. First I go in, then I go out, 2013