Delia Brown
Encyclopedia
Delia Brown is a New York-based artist originally from California. She is one of several artists who gained notice at a moment when much attention was being paid to the graduates of Los Angeles-area MFA programs. Brown graduated from UCLA in 2000.
, titled What! Are You Jealous? (featuring scenes of women drinking champagne poolside in Beverly Hills-ish backyards, with the title borrowed from a Gauguin painting of Tahitian women lounging likewise), which was attacked by Times critic Michael Kimmelman
who called the buzz around her work a "pseudo-event".
Brown's work is primarily engaged in exploring desire as an individuated experience that connects the personal to the collective unconscious, often mediated through advertising and commercial culture. Referencing early bourgeois painting genres, she paints herself and friends enacting their own fantasies of being part of the leisure class, with props from snacks and beverages to million-dollar artworks functioning as important accessories in the assumption of privilege.
In interviews, Brown has often referenced her upbringing in a left-wing activist family as influential in her choice of subject matter. She has expressed discomfort about the role of the painter/artist as serving as high-status entertainment and decor for the patron class, and much of her work seems to contain a subtle grain of hostility, implying the discomfort she feels in her own complicity in this economic arrangement.
Brown's background includes several years pursuing a career as a hiphop lyricist in a two-girl group called The Fuzz (with Evelyn Charlot, a.k.a. Evenflo), as well as studies in the Stanislavsky Method of acting. These experiences inform Brown's practice in various ways including her use of role-playing and dress-up for her paintings, and occasional forays into performance and video.
Brown has worked with actress Hollis Witherspoon in developing a fictional artist character called Chelsey Green, whose paintings and performances Brown devises and then hands off to Witherspoon the job of playing "author" to the projects. To date, Witherspoon-as-Green has been seen in a painting and video exhibition at the Margo Leavin Gallery in Los Angeles (2006) titled Step-and-Repeats and Double Self-Portraits.
Witherspoon also plays a character in Brown's on-going project titled Felicity and Caprice, a narrative series of paintings and drawings which draw upon Claude Chabrol
's camp masterpiece of 1960s French cinema, Les Biches
. A series of drawings on this theme was exhibited at D'Amelio Terras in 2007 and received praise from critics. Writing in the New York Times, Martha Schwendener says "Ms. Brown has taken hold of a cache of references, from commercial illustration to French erotic cinema, and spun it into a deadpan, streamlined narrative about women, friendship and patronage".
Life and work
Best known for painted scenes that include her friends cavorting in places of specific privilege (such as art collectors' homes), Brown gained notoriety in October 2000 when the New York Times Magazine ran an 8-page spread of her watercolors posing as fashion editorial. This publication coincided with her debut exhibition at D'Amelio Terras gallery in ChelseaChelsea, Manhattan
Chelsea is a neighborhood on the West Side of the borough of Manhattan in New York City. The district's boundaries are roughly 14th Street to the south, 30th Street to the north, the western boundary of the Ladies' Mile Historic District – which lies between the Avenue of the Americas and...
, titled What! Are You Jealous? (featuring scenes of women drinking champagne poolside in Beverly Hills-ish backyards, with the title borrowed from a Gauguin painting of Tahitian women lounging likewise), which was attacked by Times critic Michael Kimmelman
Michael Kimmelman
Michael Kimmelman is an author, critic, columnist and pianist. He is the chief architecture critic for The New York Times and written on issues of public housing, community development and social responsibility. He was the paper's longtime chief art critic and, in 2007, created the Abroad column,...
who called the buzz around her work a "pseudo-event".
Brown's work is primarily engaged in exploring desire as an individuated experience that connects the personal to the collective unconscious, often mediated through advertising and commercial culture. Referencing early bourgeois painting genres, she paints herself and friends enacting their own fantasies of being part of the leisure class, with props from snacks and beverages to million-dollar artworks functioning as important accessories in the assumption of privilege.
In interviews, Brown has often referenced her upbringing in a left-wing activist family as influential in her choice of subject matter. She has expressed discomfort about the role of the painter/artist as serving as high-status entertainment and decor for the patron class, and much of her work seems to contain a subtle grain of hostility, implying the discomfort she feels in her own complicity in this economic arrangement.
Brown's background includes several years pursuing a career as a hiphop lyricist in a two-girl group called The Fuzz (with Evelyn Charlot, a.k.a. Evenflo), as well as studies in the Stanislavsky Method of acting. These experiences inform Brown's practice in various ways including her use of role-playing and dress-up for her paintings, and occasional forays into performance and video.
Brown has worked with actress Hollis Witherspoon in developing a fictional artist character called Chelsey Green, whose paintings and performances Brown devises and then hands off to Witherspoon the job of playing "author" to the projects. To date, Witherspoon-as-Green has been seen in a painting and video exhibition at the Margo Leavin Gallery in Los Angeles (2006) titled Step-and-Repeats and Double Self-Portraits.
Witherspoon also plays a character in Brown's on-going project titled Felicity and Caprice, a narrative series of paintings and drawings which draw upon Claude Chabrol
Claude Chabrol
Claude Chabrol was a French film director, a member of the French New Wave group of filmmakers who first came to prominence at the end of the 1950s...
's camp masterpiece of 1960s French cinema, Les Biches
Les Biches
Les biches is a ballet by Francis Poulenc, premiered by the Ballets Russes in 1924. The composer, who was at the time relatively unknown, was asked by Serge Diaghilev to write a piece based on Glazunov's Les Sylphides, written seventeen years earlier...
. A series of drawings on this theme was exhibited at D'Amelio Terras in 2007 and received praise from critics. Writing in the New York Times, Martha Schwendener says "Ms. Brown has taken hold of a cache of references, from commercial illustration to French erotic cinema, and spun it into a deadpan, streamlined narrative about women, friendship and patronage".