Abstract
Cecily Brown, born 1969 in London, is a contemporary painter who lives and works in New York; today, she is one of the few female artists whose artwork sales command over the million-dollar mark. Brown’s style of Abstract Expressionism blended with her subject matter of sexualised content has been a consistent leitmotif in her paintings since she began her professional career in the 1990s. Her oeuvre is not representing a new genre of imagery, nor is it standing in the shadows of the original New York Abstract Expressionists of the 1940 and 50s, all of whom had long passed. Her oeuvre represents an emerging trend of signifiers—the female artist—and signified—sexual and graphic subject matter—in New York in the 1990s. Her art was innovative because it flipped the body politics of identity and desire and subverted the male gaze. Or was it so innovative? Brown’s oeuvre draws from the abstract expressionists—the most masculine of art genres, sexualised imagery, and painting—which through the nineties was considered dead—to position herself as one of the world’s most expensive female artists on the market. I suggest that society’s attitude towards art has not been as progressive with female equality as one would think. To be one of the world’s greatest female artists, she must look to the past and represent what has been canonical to arts ‘his-tory’.
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
The Arts in Social, Political, and Community Life
KEYWORDS
CONTEMPORARY ART, FEMINISM, GENDER
