Delia Brown

Delia Brown D'AMELIO TERRAS 525 West 22nd Street, Ground Floor March 31–May 4

Delia Brown is best known for a very particular brand of genre painting, one that depicts a commodity-filled good life lived flashily and strenuously. Her vivid renderings of the young, sexy, and indolent making the most of their fleeting moment in the sun has often made her work seem like the painterly equivalent of a Bret Easton Ellis novel. The series of ten drawings on display in this small and engaging exhibition, by comparison, is decidedly less showy, its intent more obscure. Using white gouache, graphite, and colored pencils on paper in a selection of muted colors—mustardy beige, powder-room mauve, stone gray—Brown illustrates the fictional story of Felicity and Caprice, a young artist and her wealthy, older benefactor. Made with an expert hand and an enticingly impersonal style, these soft-focus, anatomically correct drawings are reminiscent of cult illustrations such as those found, for instance, in Dr. Comfort’s The Joy of Sex. Indeed, Brown clearly enjoys flirting with bad taste: Felicity Walking in on Caprice at Her Toilette (all works 2006–2007) depicts a tense, shrewish locking of feminine gazes in front of a gilded bathroom mirror, while Felicity Struggling with a Drugged Caprice knowingly riffs on the sort of pulpy '80s miniseries in which the viewer could never be sure whether an encounter between women would end in a fight, a fuck, or raised glasses of Cristal. While Brown might seem to be trying her hand at a contemporary version of Hogarth’s eighteenth-century sequential series, wherein a harlot’s rise always ends with her well-deserved fall, what is eminently intriguing about “Felicity and Caprice” is its position as a morality tale with no discernable moral—a skillfully drawn, willfully opaque series of disjointed scenes that embraces both the everyday and the melodramatic. —Naomi Fry