Cecily Brown

I like Cecily Brown’s work. Her figures emerge and get lost within dense painterly surfaces, which often have a nod to the alloverness of abstract expressionism. Sometimes they are masses of figures, piled up like abstract shapes in some filthy orgy. Other times the spatial setting is more literal, the classic window box setting put through a de Kooning blender, pastoral idylls recalling renaissance depictions of figures ‘courting’ in the idyllic countryside.

The slipperyness of her surfaces attracts me, its not the meaty flesh of Saville, the ripped open flesh of Bacon or the fleshy flesh of Freud. It’s a sexual flesh, the very spreading of the medium, its seeming fluidity, as if on the verge of coagulating. It speaks lucidly of the transformation between states of matter, be that paint or flesh. The eroticism and sexual allure of both is not presented as some academic diatribe, but merely presents itself as the result of a painter instinctively aware of both.

I don’t know how much more Cecily Brown’s work does for me. Certainly anything else it does is in direct association with this kind of sensibility, delighting in the playfulness of her understanding of matter, colour and mark. They don’t seem to engage me beneath the surface. It’s more like a night of passion, which whilst you might come back for more, you don’t see yourself developing a truly meaningful relationship.

Martin Kippenberger was one of a series of younger artists from the 1980’s influenced by the influx into Berlin of renegade artists such as Richter and Baselitz. Berlin, whilst a centre of political and socail unrest, became a melting pot of creative forces. Kippenbergers death at 43 in 1997 has made him an iconic figure of this period. His open embrace of a wide variety of media and methods heralded new levels of creative liberation.

Martin Kippenberger Selfportrait

Underlying the hetrogenous nature of his approach is a contextual framework of deconstructing and rebelling agasint systems and idealism.

The above work, with Kippenberger himself the model, sees the figure respond to a history of self agrandising heroism and myth making. He presents himself as middle aged, stripped down to some kind of nappy, scruffy and chubby. No idealistic youth, musculature of stature. Not even the grandeur of the occult or the signfiicantly deformed. The parody of the two limp ballons improbably lifting his lardy torso is has a certain melancholic wit, the melancomic. The wit comes from the our understanding of the imbalance between the reality of such physics and the illuded possibility.

A certain triggering of shadowed pasts flickers into our heads. A middle aged, lumpy Icarus with ballons instead of wings, no grand ascent or decent. Instead a rise and fall so small that rather than a narrative ark we are left with a moment in flux.

Like in past works of grand subjects, the single figure becomes a metaphor for wider conditions. Kippenbergers floating man seems to resonate with certain conditions which seem to ooze out of the discourse of the Western world towards the end of the 20th Century.