NOW YOU SEE IT, NOW YOU DON’T
by Alexandra Anderson-Spivy



Abstract Expressionism lives in the paintings of the British-born New York artist Cecily Brown. It seems paradoxical -- no art style is more passé than Ab Ex, and no young artist more chic than Brown. So if she is a latter-day Willem de Kooning, she’s a post-feminist one. Where the Dutch house-painter objectified women in terms of his own psychological distress as googly eyed, toothy monsters, Brown pictures them as porn stars, empowered by their radical lubricity. This liquid joissance is echoed in her delicious manipulations of oil paint, which virtually seems good enough to eat.

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