Cecily Brown - Tapa dura

Presenting a world that pulses with excesses and appetites, Cecily Brown explores the breadth of human experience in her tactile oil paintings. Broadly inspired by the history of painting--from Rubens and Veronese to the muscular expressionism of Willem de Kooning--Cecily Brown's personal vision transcends classical notions of genre and narrative, freeing her subject matter from its original context and positioning it within a new aesthetic reality. Submerged within her vigorous gestural abstractions are scenes in which tangles of flesh dissolve into sensuous textures. Eschewing fixed meaning, Brown's paintings reflect the flux of life through fragmentary glimpses of form. This volume is published on the occasion of an exhibition of new paintings by the artist held in November 2011 at the Gagosian Gallery in Rome.

Klaus Kertess is a writer and curator. He has curated numerous exhibitions, including the 1995 Whitney Biennial. He has published monographs on Peter Hujar, Brice Marden, and Joan Mitchell, and has written essays for Art Forum, Parkett, and Art in America, among other publications. In 2009 he received the Lawrence A. Fleischman award for scholarly excellence in the field of American art history from the Smithsonian Archives for American Art.