D’Amelio Terras, New York
November 13 – December 23, 2004
D’Amelio Terras is pleased to present Delia Brown’s third solo exhibition at the gallery. She will present a new group of oil paintings that employ traditional genres of easel-scale representational painting, including portraiture and self-portraiture, still life, and interior scenes. In these works Brown explores the relationship between painter and model, artist and art world, viewer and subject.
In Paintings, Brown departs from her previous practice of creating a series of works that are tied together under a single narrative or conceptual framework. She continues to use familiar subject matter; the artist, her friends, and her acquaintances appear in her studio and in various social situations. The detritus of everyday life (whether authentic or fictive) accumulate to create portraits of moments in time.
Brown has always resisted the title of “Painter” because she finds the formal engagements of painting in the shadow of late Modernism to be less compelling than issues of representation. For this exhibition, however, she has produced oils that examine and exploit the medium’s historical conventions. Although Brown does not assert a moral position in her depictions, the nature of the medium causes both real and imagined scenarios to become infused with allegorical allusions. Brown explores painting’s role as a cathartic outlet for fear and desire as well as its (illusory) capacity to serve the artist’s narcissistic wish to defy mortality.
Delia Brown has recently held solo exhibitions at Margo Leavin Gallery in Los Angeles, The Apartment in Athens, Greece, and Il Capricorno in Venice, Italy. She has participated in group exhibitions in museums and galleries across Europe and the United States. Concurrent with the exhibition at D’Amelio Terras, her work will appear in Rear View Mirror at the Kettle’s Yard, University of Cambridge, in England; in 100 Artists See God at the Memorial Art Gallery, University of Rochester in Rochester, NY; and in Baja to Vancouver, a traveling museum show currently at the Wattis Institute, San Francisco. She received an MFA in painting from UCLA in 2000.
