The curators are Anna Katherine Brodbeck of the Dallas Art Museum and Simonetta Fraquelli, a consultant curator for the Barnes. Fraquelli said Brown’s paintings, which can seem cacophonous at first blush, lure visitors to “hunt out the imagery.”
“Brown’s work compels a mode of slow looking — a method inherent in the Barnes’s educational program — in which multiple or entire scenes gradually emerge from her rich and abundant layers of paint,” she said in a statement.
For “Themes and Variations,” the curators leaned into feminism and Brown’s method of wrestling art history away from a predominately male gaze into a feminine one. She often starts with a familiar trope, such as her “Girl on a Swing” (2004), whose nominal subject is true to its title, then keeps working the surface until it becomes a uniquely painterly expression of color and contrast.
Being a “feminist” painter is a label Brown has not always welcomed.
“In the early days I tried to resist that,” she said. “As a young artist, I felt like ‘I’m just a painter. Who cares if I’m female?’ The one time I wasn’t conscious of being female was in the studio.”