User:Stvkarim/Cecily Brown

Education:
Brown earned a B-TEC Diploma in Art and Design from the Epsom School of Art, Surrey, England (1985–87) (now part of the University for the Creative Arts), took drawing and printmaking classes at Morley College, London (1987–89), and received a BA degree in Fine Arts from the Slade School of Art, London (1989–93).[11] During her studies she studied for a semester abroad in New York City. She also worked as a waitress and, later, in an animation studio. In addition to painting, Brown also studied printmaking and draftsmanship. She earned First Class Honours at the Slade and was the first-prize recipient in the National Competition for British Art Students.[2] '''Brown graduated from the Slade and started exhibiting around the same time as the Young British Artists. While she acknowledges similar influences and concepts, Brown but was not a part of this group due to differences in mediums.'''

Career:
Brown left London to sign on to the Gagosian Gallery  '''for New York City in 1994, inspired by her time studying there in university. In New York, she was offered a solo exhibition by Jeffrey Deitch at Deitch Projects in New York City .[1*] Spectacle (1997), her first exhibition consisting of six erotic paintings of colorful bunny rabbits, was the first group of paintings shown at Deitch Projects. Here, her work was purchased by Charles Saatchi, which “launched her career into stardom.”'''   She became known to the art world in the late 1990s through an exhibition of abstracted paintings of rabbits. The rabbits in the works are frolicking in bacchanalian landscapes.[12] In 1995, the art world took notice of her work when she displayed Four Letter Heaven at the Telluride Film Festival; it was shown in the United States as well as Europe.[13] The films consist of sexual and pornographic themes, which she explores in the majority of her early work.[13] In 2000, she was photographed for Vanity Fair lying in front of one of her paintings, wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with a dollar sign.[14] Brown’s participation in photoshoots like this were scrutinized, with the criticism being that she was “exploiting her looks” for popularity, which took away from her art.

'''Brown now lives and works in New York City, and has had dozens of exhibitions in both the United States and in England since moving in 1994. In 2023, the Metropolitan Museum of Art held Cecily Brown: Death and the Maid, which was “the first full-breadth museum survey in New York” of Brown’s career.''' Brown maintained a studio in the Meatpacking District of Manhattan,[5] then in 2011, she worked from a studio at a former office near Union Square.

Style, Influences (proposed section)
Brown began exhibiting as a painter in the 1990’s, at a time where painting had been uncommon in the art world in favor of multimedia, sculptural, and conceptual performance art. '''Her particular style of painting is largely inspired by the New York Abstract Expressionists, namely  Francis Bacon and Willem de Kooning. This influence can be seen in her busy paintings with visible, gestural brushstrokes, as well as in her process, where she describes her relationship with the art as the artist to be more that she is performing the act of painting, and the canvas is “a record of [Brown’s] movements”.''' Brown has minimal anxiety about the art media she uses; she said in an interview with Lari Pittman that "As someone who works with traditional materials, I've always had little anxiety that the medium isn't contemporary enough, that the work could have been made at almost any time."