Serg
Gallery
Cecily Brown makes paintings that give the appearance of being in continual flux, alive with the erotic energy of her expressive application and vivid color, shifting restlessly between abstract and figurative modes. Making reference to the giants of Western painting—from Paolo Veronese, Peter Paul Rubens, and Edgar Degas to Willem de Kooning, Francis Bacon, and Joan Mitchell—as well as to popular culture, she commands an aesthetic that breaks from the strictures of narrative to achieve an extraordinary visual and thematic fluidity. Her vigorous treatment of the nude figure in particular reveals a commitment to wresting conventional subjects free from their anticipated contexts. Punctuating her visual shorthand with moments of startling clarity, Brown maintains an endless, active present.
That year, she switched modes from her solo work to form the band FIZZ with her close friends Orla Gartland, Greta Isaac and Martin Luke Brown. FIZZ released their feted – and so far sole – album The Secret To Life in 2023, and toured the project through to summer 2024 culminating in an appearance at Glastonbury Festival and an emotional, intimate final show at London’s MOTH Club. Most recently, dodie contributed the lead song ‘Someone Was Listening’ to the award-winning hit game Life Is Strange – Double Exposure, and a reworking of ‘Old Devil Moon’ to the album Chet Baker Re:imagined.
The “Wait, what?” that hits the viewer in her black paintings has to do with their size and simplicity, or what approaches simplicity. In one reclining nude—or something like it—the black behind the figure is not a reference to Goya’s late-in-life black paintings but to Goya’s (The Dream of Reason Produces Nightmares), an earlier etching where the dreamer is surrounded by a halo of darkness in the form of bats and maybe owls. “It’s the idea of the horrors and insomnia and incubuses and succubuses and nightmares,” Brown says. “I’ve always thought that paintings were a great place to talk about so many things at once. If they were movies, they could be like dramadies—a horror and a comedy and a romance.”
Mr. Snyder was born on Feb. 1, 1927 in Andover to Raymond O. and Ila K. (Brown) Snyder. He was a 1945 graduate of Andover Central School and later served in the U. S. Army during World War II. On Dec. 12, 1953, in Hornell, he married Anna M. Osmin, who predeceased him on Oct. 17, 1987. On Sept 28, 1999 he was predeceased by his second wife, Alta Hawks Patton and was widowed a third time with the passing of Dolores “Dodie” Ewart on Sept. 28, 2002.
