Cecily Brown - The Last Shipwreck - 2018
The London-born, New York-based Cecily Brown is best known for her large-scale paintings, whose heavily worked surfaces often build into maelstroms of gesture and color. Despite their size and assertiveness, there is something deeply precarious about how Brown’s paintings hold together, as if the entire composition were teetering on the edge of a knife, threatening to unravel and fall apart at any moment. How fitting, then, that Brown, a great admirer of French romantic tableaux, would turn her attention to the turbulent waters of classical shipwreck scenes; the sea a fitting analogy for the surface of a canvas, Brown’s brush its leery passenger across the tide.
In her edition for TEXTE ZUR KUNST– a ditone print pulled from one of these epic shipwreck paintings – we are able to witness more closely how Brown’s colossal pictures also contain moments of doubt and reservation, with varying levels of intensity in the application of paint, vacillating somewhere between directness and diffidence. The ability to hold opposing forces together – to construct a composition like The Last Shipwreckout of such tensions and make the resulting picture shudder from within – is a quality, a success, really, that Brown shares with the American postwar generation of painters she so greatly admires. Concentrated in the intimate print, we are able to see more clearly how Brown builds the underlying structures of her pictures to achieve her trademark dramatic effects.
Medium: Ditone print
Size: 52 × 50 cm
Edition of 100 + 20 AP + 2 PP
Numbered and signed verso
Price: SOLD OUT
Mark Leckey - Pearl Vision 2012 - 2018
British artist Mark Leckey here once again proves his skill at weaving sound and image together, breathing life into objects beyond their market value. Leckey became internationally known for his video work Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore (1999), which portrayed various music and dance styles from British youth and underground culture from the 1970s to the 1990s, and he was awarded the Turner Prize for his exhibition Industrial Light and Magic in 2008.
Pearl Vision shows a high-gloss steel snare drum from the renowned Pearl brand set against a pitch-black background. Interestingly, the convex curvature of the drum here does not reflect the photographer who shoots the picture, but instead a drummer in red pants who sits with another snare between his legs. Leckey’s edition was created during the production of his video Pearl Vision (2012) and in this work, as in Leckey’s Made in ’Eaven (2004), in which Jeff Koons’s shiny silver rabbit is circled and fetishized by the camera as an object and computer avatar, everything circulates around the Pearl drum as reflective surface, which reflects neither camera nor artist, but only the drummer. Again and again, Leckey’s camera zooms on and into the holes and screws of the snare drum, with occasional close-ups of drumsticks, while the performer moves his sticks just barely above the snare head. In line with others’ descriptions of Leckey’s unique version of commodity fetishism, where objects seem to take on a dysfunctional and narcissistic life of their own, the sight of the snare drum triggers a vague, somehow satisfying shiver of uncertainty.
Medium: C-print
Size: 40 × 40 cm
Edition of 100 + 20 AP
Numbered and signed verso
Price: € 350.–
These Cecily Brown and Mark Leckey are available at Texte zur Kunst
