Description

Copper plate etching. 66.5 x 85 cm [26.2 x 33.5 inches]. Edition of 30, signed and numbered. This edition has been generously donated by the artist and Two Palm's Press, New York. Cecily Brown has created Night's Noontime, 2020 an etching in an edition of 30, especially for Whitechapel Gallery to accompany the exhibition Radical Figures; Painting in the New Millennium, 2 February – 25 May 2020. The violence of a country landscape is a subject that Cecily Brown has returned to many times in the last 20 years. Brown's edition for the Whitechapel Gallery relates to her recent "Faeriefeller" series of paintings which portray battles in fairyland, an idyll shattered or something violent in a bucolic scene. In these works the field of vision is made up of a range of marks that stutter and jerk, or undulate like long grass and falling leaves. Cecily Brown's etching for the Whitechapel Gallery, takes it's title from a poem by Richard Dadd, the great fairy painter. As in her paintings, blades of grass criss-cross the picture plane to fragment and "crack" the image, here they split and divide the plane and loop moments or painterly "incidents". One sees trees and ground and sky; birds dead and alive; a boar's head; a parade; a skirmish of cartoonish bodies; distant smoke and fire, ink congealing into figuration, animals in the act of disappearing. For Brown the etching process encourages a wide range of marks and experimentation as do the different materials used. The artist collaborated with Two Palm's Press, New York to create this new edition.