In Cecily Brown’s 2.1-meter-long portrait, “Nana,” her frenzied brushstrokes summon a woman, chestnut-haired and nude, lolling on a bed, with her coquettish gaze directed toward spectators beyond the canvas.The piece borrows its title from Édouard Manet’s controversial 1877 painting of a young courtesan in a boudoir with her awaiting client, but reimagines Nana’s original dainty figure as a feverishly expressive — and liberating — form.It’s one of the latest paintings representing the recognized oeuvre that has made Brown the second-most-valuable living female artist after Yayoi Kusama. Her most expensive work, “Suddenly Last Summer,” sold for $6.7 million at a 2018 Sotheby’s auction. Her visual cornucopia of textured strokes, colors and provocative bodies — many of which radically reinterpret
motifs from Western modern art history — makes it impossible for onlookers to hastily scan the surface and move on. In fact, in her art, where “there is always something recognizable… even when it is at its most abstract,” things only reveal themselves slowly over time. Even when you think you’re done with the piece, there is always going to be something new that catches the eye.New York Times art critic Roberta Smith once described Brown as “a painter of excess, offering endless possibilities for looking and interpreting — more than some viewers can easily handle.”“I like the idea that it’s changing before your eyes, that it’s elusive and very hard to hold onto in a way that you’re always chasing after it,” the 55-year-old remarked at Gladstone Gallery Seoul last month during her first visit to the country. “It’s almost a battle; you want to look at it, but it’s sort of vibrating 슬롯게이밍 in place.”