Across new paintings and mixed-media works, Candy Baby takes an incisive look at the history of Madonna and Child portraits—Brown interprets the psychology and culturally loaded definitions of motherhood through these theological subjects. For her new series of work, Brown pulls from The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s extensive collection of early modern European painting and their more than 300 variations on the Madonna and Child.
Though her subjects hail from the early modern European art tradition, Brown’s style is decidedly contemporary—the work of Dana Schutz (who reinterpreted the Madonna and Child in her 2016 charcoal drawing “Waterfall”), Alice Neel, and Judy Chicago are apt analogues to Brown’s practice. Works in Candy Baby like the acrylic and gouache painting “Cherry Blues,” remove the Madonna and Child from their Renaissance-era perfection— both formally and conceptually—adding a layer of melancholy and distance between the two figures. Deep blues offset by highlights of bright pink cannibalize the painting’s reference, a 15th century work by Italian painter Vittore Crivelli. Her painterly style—seen in thick, unconcealed brushstrokes—pays homage to her own labor in creating these works. Unencumbered by the need for naturalistic representation, Brown’s work exudes the powerful and nuanced emotions of women, mothers or not, and their depiction in art and culture.
Drawing from the artist’s lived experience, Candy Baby looks at the pressure she and other women have faced to become mothers through highlighting phallic symbols and misogynistic narratives present in historical art. Well-known religious metaphors like the apple, representing Eve’s original sin from the book of Genesis, and lesser-known ones like cucumbers symbolizing “redemption” are placed under Brown’s artistic microscope. Blown-up and rendered in fauvist-esque palettes the artist exposes these masculinist narratives hiding in plain sight. The work in Candy Baby establishes a foundation through which the artist and other women burdened by socially prescribed duties can explore possibilities of freeing courage.
