Untitled Art, Miami Beach
Delia Brown
November 29 – December 3, 2022
Early in her decades-long career, Delia Brown elevated the selfie to an art form, painting herself and friends posing in decadent scenes of aspirational privilege, exhibiting her paintings around the globe at galleries and museums. Brown, who is now fifty-three (and well past menopause due to treatments for multiple reproductive cancers in 2015), eventually came to believe that nobody would want to fix their gaze upon her middle-aged body. “When I’d see photos of my aging face and body I felt real horror — I couldn’t believe that was me,” admits Brown, explaining why she stopped painting herself at age forty. “But in the last couple of years I realized that as a feminist who paints women, I need to push back on the values of our capitalistic, patriarchal system, and not allow it to dictate how I feel about myself and about aging — to reject invisibility and self-erasure as my destiny.” So, as a challenge not just to herself but to a culture that shames women for aging, she decided to reintroduce herself as the central character in her work.
With this suite of ten oil paintings, produced specifically for Untitled Art Miami Beach, Brown brings a newfound psychedelic dimension to her work, inspired by mystical revelations received during entheogenic journeys, as well as aquatic adventures under the sea of the Azores archipelago. Her new self-portraits, stripped bare of worldly encumbrances, suggest an evolution of consciousness beyond human realms, somewhere beyond the sea and even beyond representation itself. Within the archeology of the intimate, ecstasy finds its way through the depths of interiority.
In a number of the works, Brown’s “Rebirth of Venus” series, the artist depicts herself in a state of radiant bliss amongst the creatures of the sea, inspired by the “Birth of Venus” paintings of Odilon Redon which were created between 1910 and 1912. But when Brown emerges from the seashells she is not the fertile young goddess seen in Redon’s canvases, nor is she the lithe beauty of Botticelli’s more famous depiction; rather, here is a middle-aged woman spellbound by her sublime surroundings, as if seeing the world through new eyes. In three larger works, abstract drips and splatters conjure an ecstatic, creative cosmos. With Sanskrit titles that reference Vedic stages of self-realization, these works suggest that, as the protagonists of our own spiritual evolution, we can be “re-born” at any age.
Delia Brown (b. 1969, Berkeley CA) currently lives and works between Berkeley and Los Angeles, California. She holds a BA from the University of California, Santa Cruz (1992), and an MFA from UCLA (2000). Brown has had over twenty solo exhibitions at Margo Leavin Gallery, LA; D’Amelio Terras, NY; Tibor de Nagy, NY; Baldwin Gallery, Aspen; Galleria Il Capricorno, Venice; and Gallery Hyundai, Seoul, among others. Recently she’s been included in group exhibitions at the FLAG Art Foundation, 56 Henry, Eric Firestone Gallery, and Miles McEnery, in NY; and Maccarone, Gavlak Gallery, and Praz Dellavade in LA;Her self-portraits were the subject of a solo survey at John Michael Kohler Arts Center Sheboygan, WI in 2006, and other institutional exhibitions includeThe 10th Biennial of Havana, Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Cuba (2009) and thePrague Biennial, Czech Republic (2003). Her work is included in the permanent collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Grunwald Center Collection of the Hammer Museum, Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, Seattle Art Museum, and Berkeley Art Museum & Pacific Film Archive.
