Sims Reed Gallery : LOPF Online | The Platform For Prints

Sims Reed Gallery are delighted to present a group of monotypes by the British-born artist Cecily Brown.  Brown is a central figure to the current resurgence of painting, revitalising the expressive potential of figuration and landscape. The artist has maintained a highly original, painterly style in her work, often hovering between figuration and abstraction – blurring the line between the two. Allusions to figures dissolve into painterly marks. Her work draws on influences from the Old Masters to Abstract Expressionism.   Of all the mediums that Brown employs, she considers monotypes as closest to her paintings. When exploring a new subject in her paintings, she will often spend time creating monotypes first. Using oil paint on Plexiglas, Brown’s unique monotypes have a fluid and spontaneous quality to them. They revisit compositions and motifs that have appeared in past paintings. 

“I often think of [the monotypes] not as studies for the paintings, but as studies while I’m working on paintings. You don’t get as caught up in the material aspect because they’re fast and you can’t pile the paint on.” 

“In drawings I’m almost always copying from another source – it’s a way of getting information. Whereas painting and monotypes are more like putting information out there that’s already been digested.” 

Cecily Brown was born in London in 1969. She lives and works in New York. Public collections include Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; and Tate Gallery, London. Solo exhibitions include “Directions: Cecily Brown,” Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C. (2002); MACRO, Rome (2003); Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid (2004); Museum of Modern Art, Oxford (2005); Kunsthalle Mannheim (2005–06); Des Moines Art Center, Iowa (2006); Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (2006–07); Deichtorhallen, Hamburg (2009); “Based on a True Story,” Kestner Gesellschaft, Hannover (2010, traveled to GEM, Museum of Contemporary Art, The Hague); and Galleria Civica d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Turin (2015) and Bleinheim Palace, Oxfordshire, UK (2020-21).