Steeped in the academic tradition of painting, Brown draws from the compositional structure, historical motifs, and virtuosic brushwork of master painters across a diverse range of genres. Referencing these artists and other contemporary images in their entirety or by isolating specific elements, her paintings follow an iterative process of drawing and re-drawing, as an exercise in internalizing pictorial systems. Painted in a palette of bright hues to deep blacks, Brown’s works are centered on the human figure, built with layers of vibrating oil paint. Her loose gestures obscure and deconstruct a singular reading as bodies break down into restless, anfractuous and elusive activity. Collectively they evoke the fleeting nature of perception and the loss implicit in memory, which Brown ascribes to a chapter from Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past: Within a Budding Grove. As Proust’s narrator longs to know a “little band” of girls on the beach, we, the viewer, desire to explicate Brown’s figures, held in mutable suspense between recognition and abstraction.
Paula Cooper Gallery
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