Cecily Brown's frenzied, elusive art pulsates in Seoul

Cecily Brown's "Nana" (2022-23) / Courtesy of the artist and Gladstone Gallery

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.

Cecily Brown's "Offal with Lemons" (2023-24) / Courtesy of the artist and Gladstone Gallery

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 in place.”

Installation view of Cecily Brown's solo exhibition titled "Nana and other stories" at Gladstone Gallery Seoul / Courtesy of the artist and Gladstone Gallery

“Nana” is a striking prelude to the New York-based painter’s solo show at the Seoul gallery titled “Nana and other stories,” which comes on the heels of her compact mid-career survey, “Death and the Maid,” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art last year.

The exhibition is, in a way, an extension of Brown’s Met show as the seven new sumptuous paintings on display result from her revisiting — and expanding on — her previous series and subjects spotlighted at the New York museum.

“I feel the works here deal with my processing of the exhibition [at the Met] and what it meant,” she said. “It’s almost like my personal retrospective, [staged] after looking back at all my past works and seeing threads that I had forgotten about or had never taken up in another direction.”

These introspective moments and changes are more evident in some pieces than others.

In “Lavender’s Blue,” displayed on the second floor, the artist fills the scene with pastel tones of blues and purples, deviating from her usually favored palettes of reds, yellows and pinks. For the first time, she also opted for a paint roller instead of a brush to bring the melancholic nude to life.

“I always try to change the size, scale, color and subject [of my art] but I realized in the Met show that I never changed my brushes,” she noted, adding that her newfound tool, which helps her cover larger areas at once, “fights against my desire and impulse to get really intense and neurotic.”

Installation view of Cecily Brown's "Nana and other stories" at Gladstone Gallery Seoul / Courtesy of the artist and Gladstone Gallery

The paintings in the basement lean more heavily toward the fantastical and the gestural.

“Good Queen Mab” recalls a fairy referred to in Shakespeare’s play “Romeo and Juliet” and Victorian fairy art, capturing the uneasy feeling of “something percolating in the undergrowth.”

Meanwhile, in “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice,” the London-born artist puts a manic spin on the still-life of everyday domestic items. “You might think it’s a lemon one minute, but the next time you look, maybe it’s a dead rabbit or a screaming dog,” she said with a chuckle.

Such a frantic accumulation of colors and motifs in Brown’s art is what make the viewing experience a wonderfully confounding one.

“Nana and other stories” runs through June 8 at Gladstone Gallery Seoul.