Delia Brown: Precious May 8 through June 21, 2008 Opening Reception: May 10, 6-8 PM Exhibitions Extended: Please note that Delia Brown's Precious and Lisa Tan's Moving a Mountain will be on view through Friday, July 27th, 2008.
D’Amelio Terras is pleased to present Precious, new oil-on-panel paintings by gallery artist Delia Brown. Works on view present the latest in Brown’s continued, staged performances where she and her friends act out scenes of complicated desire. In this series, Brown casts herself and childless peers in the roles of mothers. This time around, she asks a bit more of her collaborators — to borrow perhaps their most prized possessions, their children.
The intimately detailed works are reminiscent of the 19th century scenes depicted by Mary Cassatt and Berthe Morisot. According to Brown, “The title, Precious, also refers to how attitudes about paintings are gendered. In painting school during the late 80s, one was told not to be ‘precious’, which was a way of saying that one must instead be bold, muscular, unattached, unsentimental – in a word, masculine.”
Precious shows the artist entering portraits of maternity, propping children on her hip or cozying up in rumpled sheets for story-time. Brown has created images by which she investigates maternity without the compromises of real motherhood, but perhaps too, without the rewards.
Brown has also offered cherubic stills of children alone, gazing back at the viewer amidst their snacks and toys. Stepping out of the frame, the artist captures 11-year-old girls, primping in the bathroom or leisurely playing with their puppies against fine fabrics and furnishings. The luminescent layers of paint recall the delicate decadence of the Rococo painters while the subject, girls apart from their mothers, idle their time in a Balthusian tension where innocence teeters on the cusp of naughtiness.
Delia Brown has exhibited widely throughout Europe and the United States. In 2007, Brown’s “Felicity & Caprice” opened at D’Amelio Terras, and “Guerrilla Lounging” showed at Baldwin Gallery in Aspen, Colorado, accompanied by a catalogue. In 2006, her first museum show at John Michael Kohler Arts Center, Sheboygan, WI focused on self-portraiture. In 2005, D’Amelio Terras organized “All Access Atelier” at Galerie Emmanuel Perrotin, Paris, France turning the gallery into a fully functional painting studio in which Brown painted from live models in constructed environments. Delia Brown received an MFA in painting from UCLA in 2000 and currently lives and works in New York.
Lisa Tan: Moving a Mountain May 8 through June 21, 2008 Opening reception: Saturday, May 10th, 6-8 PM
D’Amelio Terras is pleased to present “Moving a Mountain”, a Front Room exhibition by artist Lisa Tan. Works on display are a result of a trip Tan made from New York to Mexico City in November 2007. Tan’s fleeting journeys often provide an impetus for her work, which attempts to poetically encapsulate where desire and melancholia meet. This trip to Mexico City, coinciding with the Day of The Dead holiday, became a quiet discovery on what the artist found to be living.
Tan pays particular attention to the properties of midnight in a foreign city, a combination she believes to produce a ripe sense of dislocation and heightened observation. At midnight in Mexico City, while she overhears (and voyeuristically listens to) her hotel neighbors, Tan studies a painting of a mountain hung in her room and thinks of her own state of being. Taking detailed notes and photographs, but unable to discard the thought of the painting of the mountain, the artist concludes the journey months later when she returns to Mexico City to leave a trace of herself that will remain in the hotel room she once occupied.
Lisa Tan lives and works in New York City. She was born in Syracuse, NY and was raised in West Texas until she moved to Los Angeles for graduate studies. Tan received an MFA from the University of Southern California. Tan has had one-person exhibitions at Andreas Grimm Gallery in Munich in 2005 and 2007, and LA>
REVIEWS
Delia Brown reviewed in Time Out New York
Delia Brown's "Precious" is reviewed on page 72 of the June 19-25 issue of Time Out New York. Brown's exhibition has been extended one week, and is now on view through Friday, June 27, 2008.
Merrily Kerr writes,
"Delia Brown paints subjects we love to hate. In the past, she’s depicted herself and her friends in a manner blatantly intended to arouse jealousy—flaunting their youth, sexiness and supposed wealth. Her latest series still unfolds amid the trappings of (borrowed) luxury, but adds cute kids as props in saccharine portraits of the artist and other women (none of whom have children, according to the gallery statement) playing happy mom. As tidy and controlled as her earlier scenes were louche, Brown’s vision of motherhood is as irritatingly unrealistic as it is incisive in exposing unattainable ideals.
Brown has claimed Mary Cassatt as an influence, but even Cassatt occasionally pictured a feeding or diaper change, labors that Brown ignores. Instead, cooperative children are seen lounging with carefully preened moms on cozy beds or couches in immaculate homes; it’s unclear whether the little darlings are “precious” for being themselves or for serving as must-have possessions.
Brown may have intended some sort of meditation on class and parenting, but the absence of affection between mothers and kids, and the sterility of their settings, are more evocative in revealing how hard it is to step into someone else’s reality. What starts out as another provocation turns into a confession of self-doubt, a 180-degree turnaround from the cockiness of her earlier work. Poignant and decidedly less frivolous, these latest panels signal that Brown is perhaps moving in a more personally risky—but meaningful—direction."
Delia Brown featured in the New Yorker
Delia Brown's current exhibition, "Precious," currently on view at D'Amelio Terras was reviewed on page 12 of the June 2, 2008 issue of the New Yorker. The exhibition will be on view through June 21, 2008.
From the New Yorker's website:
"Children, as any tabloid will attest, are the ultimate accessory. Brown, a painter, indulges the fantasy, portraying herself and several similarly childless friends as mothers to a borrowed cast of toddlers and tweens in a glam range of settings. (Even without the press release, we know the pairings are fictions, because the players appear mixed and matched.) Staged in the children’s real homes, the opulent little oils present Brown and her surrogates attending to tots, while Lolita-aged girls lounge unsupervised. One suspects that Brown is attempting a critique, but there’s a wrinkle: her project is as narcissistic as the culture she takes aim at. Through June 21. (D’Amelio Terras, 525 W. 22nd St. 212-352-9460.)"
Delia Brown featured on Artnet
Delia Brown's current exhibition at D'Amelio Terras, "Precious," is featured on Artnet. The exhibition is on view from May 8 through June 21, 2008.
Elisabeth Kley writes,
"Delia Brown, a figurative painter from Los Angeles, is exhibiting a series of paintings of mothers and female children in a show titled Precious at D’Amelio Terras. Brown’s previous paintings of vapid young people enjoying a clichéd celebrity life are sometimes mistakenly considered autobiographical, but the work is really grounded in social satire and a sense of loss. This time the twist is that none of the women portrayed (including the artist herself) are really mothers, or even related to the children they are with.
Painted with loose tiny brushstrokes, these very small pictures (the largest is 14 x 18 in.) are reminiscent of works by American impressionists Berthe Morisot and Mary Cassatt. Women and children interact inside bourgeois interiors filled with modern and faux antique accoutrements, including stuffed animals, brand name foods, small candelabras with shades, and canopied beds. In Homework (2008) a woman strokes one little girl’s hair while holding another toddler on her knee. The figures are almost overwhelmed by the wallpaper of tangled green and turquoise vegetation behind them.
Other paintings of pre-teen nymphets suggest works by François Boucher and Jean-Honore Fragonard. The subject of Portrait of an Idling Young Girl (2008) sprawls in a chair looking bored as her dog looks on alertly from the couch. A tray of jars of green peas adds a contrasting touch to the golden light suffusing the room. This strangely oppressive, almost claustrophobic scene of privileged wealth conveys a sense of emptiness amid overwhelming clutter."
Delia Brown reviewed on Frieze.com
Delia Brown was reviewed on frieze.com by Morgan Falconer. He exhibition, "Precious" is currently on view at D'Amelio Terras until June 21, 2008.
Morgan Falconer writes,
"Delia Brown’s new pictures hold out a dim hope for New York’s patron class, that they may finally get the flattery they crave whilst also patronising the new art. Perhaps Brown doesn’t take commissions, but they would surely come flowing in if she did: her very candied new figurative paintings depict her female friends, often with children, in a series of invented situations that have them living the dream lives of the urban American rich.
Motherhood, money and sex appeal are the prizes that these fictional women cherish above all: the woman reclining on a bed with her toddler in A Mother’s Joy (all works 2008) is revelling in her triumph in see-through lingerie; the slick matriarch in Winter Portrait holds her cherubs amidst spacious, old world interiors. All have won life’s lottery, and they intend to ensure that their children do so too: in The Recital, the glamorous mother observes her darling playing a tiny grand piano with all the stately grace of a concert pianist; in Mother’s Bathroom a couple of teenage girls practise applying lipstick in an interior that could almost be the backdrop for a Rococo love scene. Brown knows the language of style these women speak, the blend of formality and informality, and she knows the painterly language they want themselves portrayed in as well – the flushes of peach, the mildly expressive brushwork.
Brown’s new work reminds one of Jeff Koons’ occasional satires on the baubles of the rich. Her parodies are not quite so successful, though, since they could probably pass unnoticed alongside the work of those artists who really do service the vulgar end of the market. One also misses the fascinating clashes of genre and gender that have lit up Brown’s pictures in the past: these scenes are essentially modernized, ‘feminized’ genre scenes, and they don’t give off the sparks of some of Brown’s Hopperesque scenes of women alone in the city. But her new work continues to mount a strong argument for the critical potential of figurative painting, and Brown continues to look like a girl’s best bet to take on John Currin on his own turf and kick him in the balls. It’s just a matter of time, and aim."
Lisa Tan featured as an Artforum.com "Critics' Pick"
Lisa Tan is currently featured as a "Critics Pick" on Artforum.com. Her exhibition, "Moving A Mountain" is currently on view at D'Amelio Terras, from May 8 through June 21, 2008.
Lauren O'Neill-Butler writes,
"At first glance, the three works in this show (a painting, a picture of a painting, and a sheet of text) might invoke Joseph Kosuth’s tautological investigation in One and Three Chairs, 1965. But a closer look reveals a muted introspection and restrained melancholy that couldn’t be further from Kosuth’s Conceptual landmark. Moving a Mountain, 2008, documents Tan’s visit to Mexico City last November and broadens the wanderlust increasingly central to her practice. “It was the Day of the Dead, and the city was decorated with orange clusters of candles and marigolds,” begins the text, which looks like a delicately incised page from a book yet reads like a diary entry or a letter. The narrative cautiously describes Tan’s walk down the Alameda to a closed restaurant, her Colonial-style hotel, the sounds of two lovers in the room above, and then, in more detail, a painting above the bed of a snow-capped mountain. Months later, Tan returned to Mexico to replace that mountain image with another: a painting of a desert scene reminiscent of West Texas, where she was raised. Tan took a large-format photograph of that work, which faces off in the small gallery with the original Mexican painting like an imperfect reflection. Although the paintings are not too remarkable (the late Bob Ross comes to mind), the metaphoric anchors of reciprocity and exchange that link them are intriguing. More involving, though, is the sense of privacy and isolation that suffuses the understated installation. With consummate frugality, Tan examines the social life of objects and the mechanics of desire, without neglecting the equally powerful longing to get lost, to be alone."
