Riffs and samples are where Brown thrives, and the joy of her new show is in the ways we get to see a painter charting her course with new paints and old paintings—simultaneously looking back through the history of painting and moving forward. The 30-something works in the Barnes exhibition represent the largest presentation of her pieces in the US up to now, and walking through it naturally feels like taking a trip through a painter’s career. But walking through it with the painter—she took a small group through the rooms a few days before the official opening—is a trip through the painter’s mind’s eye, in this case a painter who, at mid-career, is fully embracing the rewards of repetition, of returning to themes. She is also a painter who hopes you will stay a while with her work. “I can’t emphasize enough my desire that the viewer spend time with the paintings,” she says at the start of the tour. “In a way, my challenge has always been to be able to make a painting that stops you in your tracks, that makes you want to look, but then keeps revealing more, the more you give to it. So it’s a very slow experience. But at the same time, I love to make something very eye-catching. Hence the bright color of these early works.”
The first room we stop in highlights a grouping entitled “Painting the Flesh,” a nod to both the moment Brown began exhibiting her paintings and the point in the history of painting that she first explored. Then as now, each of her paintings are akin to exciting performances, the resonances reverberating even after she has put her brushes down. She applies oils in the 21st century in collaboration with painters who came before her—a bold move now, and even more bold in the mid-1990s, when young artists were not likely to be painting. The trend was toward conceptual art, and the YBA (Young British Artists) were putting animals in formaldehyde (Damien Hirst) or photographing anonymous subjects with placards (Gillian Wearing). But, as Brown puts it: “I basically just had to realize you can deny the kind of artist you are, and I could be a mediocre conceptual or video artist, or I could try to be a good painter.” (Later, she’ll remember one failed experiment with conceptualism: “Do you know Duchamp’s With My Tongue in My Cheek?” Brown asks. “I made an image, and it was with my tongue in his cheek. It was pretty crap.”)
Bunnies were an early subject. They were bunnies, but also representational questions (is it a duck or a bunny?) that she borrowed from Wittgenstein via Jasper Johns. The bunnies offered an either-or that seems to have tickled her interest in the intersection between what’s literal and abstract: the mind conspires with the eye to see bodies in shapes or shapes in bodies. “These rabbits and bunny paintings were in conversation with the art of the past that I was so interested in,” she says.
