Riffs and samples are the place Brown thrives, and the enjoyment of her new present is within the methods we get to see a painter charting her course with new paints and previous work—concurrently trying again via the historical past of portray and shifting ahead. The 30-something works within the Barnes exhibition signify the biggest presentation of her items within the US to this point, and strolling via it naturally appears like taking a visit via a painter’s profession. However strolling via it with the painter—she took a small group via the rooms a number of days earlier than the official opening—is a visit via the painter’s thoughts’s eye, on this case a painter who, at midcareer, is totally embracing the rewards of repetition, of returning to themes. She can be a painter who hopes you’ll keep some time along with her work. “I can’t emphasize sufficient my need that the viewer spend time with the work,” she says initially of the tour. “In a means, my problem has at all times been to have the ability to make a portray that stops you in your tracks, that makes you wish to look however then retains revealing extra the extra you give to it. So it’s a really sluggish expertise. However on the identical time, I like to make one thing very eye-catching. Therefore the intense coloration of those early works.”
The primary room we cease in highlights a grouping entitled Portray the Flesh, a nod to each the second Brown started exhibiting her work and the purpose within the historical past of portray that she first explored. Then as now, every of her work is akin to thrilling performances, the resonances reverberating even after she has put her brushes down. She applies oils within the twenty first century in collaboration with painters who got here earlier than her—a daring transfer now and much more daring within the mid-Nineties, when younger artists weren’t prone to be portray. The pattern was towards conceptual artwork, and the YBA (Younger British Artists) have been placing animals in formaldehyde (Damien Hirst) or photographing nameless topics with placards (Gillian Sporting). However as Brown places it: “I mainly simply needed to notice you possibly can deny the form of artist you’re, and I could possibly be a mediocre conceptual or video artist, or I might attempt to be a very good painter.” (Later, she’ll keep in mind one failed experiment with conceptualism: “Have you learnt Duchamp’s With My Tongue in My Cheek?” Brown asks. “I made a picture, and it was with my tongue in his cheek. It was fairly crap.”)
Bunnies have been an early topic. They have been bunnies but in addition representational questions (is it a duck or a bunny?) that she borrowed from Wittgenstein by way of Jasper Johns. The bunnies provided an either-or that appears to have tickled her curiosity within the intersection between what’s literal and summary: The thoughts conspires with the attention to see our bodies in shapes or shapes in our bodies. “These rabbits and bunny work have been in dialog with the artwork of the previous that I used to be so desirous about,” she says.
