Fair of Face, Full of Woe

Cecily Brown British

Not on view

This small-scale triptych demonstrates Brown’s characteristic use of highly expressionistic and densely layered brushstrokes that tend to blur distinctions between the representational and the abstract. Initially the painting appears devoid of recognizable subject matter, yet closer inspection reveals hints of bodily fragments entangled among lushly rendered landscapes. There is a shared materiality between flesh and paint, which Brown suggestively exploits for both optic and erotic charge. Like the title, which references an English fortune-telling nursery rhyme, the painting exists in constant flux, its visual fate determined by each new viewer.

Fair of Face, Full of Woe, Cecily Brown (British, born London, 1969), Oil on canvas

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