Cecily Brown’s Repeated Images Tell a Story About Drawing

THE NEW YORK
By Will Heinrich

“Untitled (Paradise),” 2014, by Cecily Brown, is part of “Rehearsal,” a show of this painter’s work at the Drawing Center. Credit Courtesy of the artist

NEW YORK---The London-born painter Cecily Brown is known for stormy, intensely colored canvases, usually abstract, which depend for their effect not on any overall argument or scheme but on a sheer profusion of rapid, discontinuous strokes. They stand or fall according to some mysterious magic achieved by no one choice but by all of the artist’s choices together. Some are thin, some are earnest, some are charming, but whether you like them or not, what they really demonstrate is the power of repetition — a power on even clearer display in “Rehearsal,” an expansive tour of Ms. Brown’s drawing practice ably curated by Claire Gilman at the Drawing Center. [link]

Drawing Center: Cecily Brown’s “Rehearsal” (Through Dec. 18, 2016); 35 Wooster Street, Manhattan, NY; (212)219-2166; drawingcenter.org