Half-Bind

Label TextCecily Brown’s expansive canvases are inspired by several centuries of art history as well as the physical act of painting and the dimensionality of paint. Her work captures bodies moving, landscapes in motion, and the movement of the artist as she brushed, scraped, and spread paint across the surface. Sensuality is a critical element of Brown’s art, and Half-Bind’s abstracted imagery suggests embracing figures in its center. While the dynamic brush work of Abstract Expressionist artists such as Jackson Pollock and Joan Mitchell are obvious influences on this work, the vivid pink, browns, and purple here are evidence of Brown’s study of landscape painting, particular the Romantic and Baroque landscapes of 18th-century Europe. With its monumental scale, complex composition, and paint so thick it reaches off the canvas, this painting immerses the viewer in a multi-layered visual experience.

DimensionsCanvas (/image): 103 × 83 × 1 1/2 in. (261.6 × 210.8 × 3.8 cm)

Accession Number 2006.13

Classificationspainting

ProvenanceArtist; (Gagosian Gallery, New York); Des Moines Art Center [purchased from the previous, 2006]

Collections

Collection Highlights

Images (1)

Audio (2)

60th Anniversary Audio Tour with Jeff Fleming, Director

Audio Tour with Mia Farrell, Museum Educator

Audio Transcript

Cecily Brown (British, active United States, born 1969)
Half-Bind, 2005

Run Time: 2:42
Recorded by Mia Farrell, Museum Educator / February 20, 2020

This is Mia Farrell Museum Educator at the Des Moines Art Center. We are standing before Cecily Brown’s painting Half Bind, created in 2005 and acquired by the Des Moines Art Center in 2006.

The painting is made in a very physical way, with its expansive size, the brush strokes become reaching. At first approach it is a rich, colorful, luscious mass of movement and suggested form. Focusing on individual brush strokes, we can see the color-play; pinks, black, greens, browns pulling through one another and blending. We can feel the gestures and large arm movements as we follow them. At this close perspective it is easy to see the unintentional, the loss of control, abstraction, the playful nature of paint with paint, drips and smears of color. When we spend time or step back we remember the artist and her mind and her intention. Forms and composition reveal themselves; a nude woman’s torso with over worked breasts is elevated in the center, with only the suggestion of a face or limbs, the abstraction around her becomes an overgrown landscape. Faces find us throughout the painting as we find them, layerings of things being hidden and concealed. A dogs head, letters. Playing eye spy with us, “I never think of myself of hiding imagery, but things get hidden as you go on.” Says Brown of her work. “I want to make forms that are either just dissolving or in the process of just becoming something and to play with the relationship between the eye and the brain.” She says.

Cecily Brown, born 1969 in London, moved to New York City in the early 90s, she creates drawings and paintings marring figure, abstraction and expressive mark making. Themes of sexuality, gender, and physical tensions captivate the artist as she renders her work, often in a larger than life scale. Through the time taken and discovery that Brown experiences while painting, the viewer is offered a complex journey to explore, over and over again. Brown explains, "One of the main things I would like my work to do is to reveal itself slowly, continuously and for you never to feel that you’re really finished looking at something."