Great expectations

There has been a great deal of media coverage of this exhibition of new paintings by Cecily Brown (born 1969) at the curiously named Modern Art Oxford. (It’s actually an Arts Council-funded public gallery.) Brown, though a Londoner, has lived in New York since 1994 and has made a substantial name for herself there and in Europe, showing recently at the Reina Sofia in Madrid, and at Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, Rome, in 2003. This is her first major solo exhibition in Britain.

Its reception has been mixed. Magazine profiles tend to stress her impeccable pedigree (her father is the late David Sylvester, her mother the distinguished novelist Shena Mackay), and dilate upon the primary subject matter of her painting — sex. British critics, a notoriously curmudgeonly lot, like to show that they aren’t easily impressed, even by bravura paintwork and international sales. Consequently, a couple of the broadsheets consider she has been over-hyped, though Richard Dorment in the Telegraph calls her work ‘dazzling’ and Jackie Wullschlager in the FT thinks that ‘for sheer painterly verve’ this is ‘the most interesting show by a living artist in England this year’. A great deal has been made of Brown’s use of paint, and it is this which has to be the focus of any serious discussion of her achievement to date.

I have been following her work with great interest since 1988, though because of her departure for the States I haven’t seen a great deal of it since her debut show here in 1999. That exhibition of just four large oil paintings was at Victoria Miro’s Cork Street space, and was a considerable success, with the Tate buying a picture. Let me quote briefly from my review:

Her work is intelligent and generous …at once notational and baroque. There’s a great depth of figurative reference here, but it doesn’t decode easily….