Long inspired by Old Master painters, Cecily Brown’s latest solo show at Paula Cooper Gallery engages with the fruitful collaboration between 17th century painters Jan Brueghel the Elder’s and Peter Paul Rubens. Brown’s work on paper – etchings, drawings with watercolor and monotypes – reworks aspects of the duo’s collaborative series of paintings ‘The Five Senses’ from 1617-18, abstracting and condensing the space of interior scenes. This lush and engaging painting in the gallery’s main space takes that impulse further, proffering a recognizable plate of oysters with lobster at the center of the canvas while turning the room’s other forms into a fluid, fluctuating space from which faces and forms emerge. (On view through Dec 7th).
