18 February - 21 March 2009
For his fourth show with Sadie Coles HQ, Don Brown presents his latest series of sculptures. The works include major new pieces in his ongoing series of portraits of his wife, Yoko, as well as one of his compelling renderings of fruit.
In Yoko XXV (Silver Twin), two sylphlike Yokos are rendered in Sterling silver. The cool, mercury colouring imbues the pair with a gleaming fluidity, emphasising their physical intertwinement and symbiosis. The lowered gazes and gentle touch of one hand upon the hip, engender a sense of contemplativeness and tenderness characteristic of Don Brown’s art. The figures are variously expressive of doubleness, appearing to be twins, mirror images or doppelgangers, while theirflickering surface continually compresses and reflects their surroundings. Within their tentative embrace we may also glimpse the most intimate and ineffable of human relationships – of ourselves to ourselves. In other pieces, Yoko is presented in bronze, her hips swivelling sideways and arms casually hanging down, and in white acrylic composite, where we see her variously with her arms up, her hair in a sharp bob, yawning, and pregnant.
Don Brown’s art explores questions of representational perfection. His sculptural vocabulary harks back to classical antiquity and the elegance and idealism of neoclassical marbles such as Canova’s The Three Graces (1814-17), while also invoking modernist realism as instanced by Degas’ La Petite Danseuse de Quatorze Ans (1881). In Brown’s distinctive take on classical sculpture, the place of an idealised heroine (or ‘Everywoman’) is taken by the real-life figure of the artist’s wife in a casual pose. Yoko becomes a conflation of the generic and the individual.
Don Brown was born in Norfolk and studied at the Central School of Art (1983-5), followed by the Royal College of Art (1985-8). Recent solo exhibitions have taken place across Europe including a one person survey at Le Consortium, Dijon, France (2007). Don Brown has taken part in several significant group shows, including The Naked Portrait, 1900-2007 at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, Edinburgh, UK (2007). The artist lives and works in Suffolk.
28 April - 29 May 2004
In his new show at HQ Don Brown presents new works from his on-going series of sculptures of his wife, Yoko. The pure white figures, recreating Yoko at half or three quarter scale, are breathtaking in their perfection. Brown’s understated aesthetic belies his technical virtuosity and attention to the tiniest detail. His contemporary take on classical realism leads him on a parallel quest for and celebration of the sculptural and physical ideal. In the new sculptures Yoko is portrayed in natural poses. In one she sits slumped on a chair, her legs at angles and head lolling as she takes a nap. Again sitting, but this time awake she perches on the edge of a table, her hands resting on the top, her ankles loosely crossed. Standing upright in a floor length dress, her formal pose is disrupted as one hand reaches across the body in a slightly self conscious gesture, to support the other elbow; sculptural majesty is replaced by a recognizable humanity. In Double Yoko it is as if two identical twins stand together, naked but for their knickers and wedge sandals. One has her hand round the other’s waist, while the other returns the gentle embrace by resting her hand on her companion’s shoulder.The natural way in which Brown allows the body to seek and offer support, from furniture, from another person, from itself, contrasts with the conventions of classical sculpture, where celebration of physical prowess called for the figures to stand strong and their implied dynamism always somehow seemed static. Into gestures and movements that were once theatrical and posed, Brown has injected a sense of fluidity. Similarly, by eschewing the heavy materials of classicism, he has forsaken gravitas in favour of something more delicate, more ephemeral and more human. While Brown pares down towards the essence of beauty, Yoko retains vestiges of her humanity, including her vulnerability, sexuality and dignity.
13 September-14 October 2000: Yoko
The subject of Don Brown’s five new figurative sculptures is ‘Yoko’, Don Brown’s wife. With this project Brown pursues a sculptural ideal, a perfection of form, and Brown’s exact measurements of Yoko’s skeletal structure are reduced to exactly half scale to intensify our analysis of its beauty. Like a contemporary ‘eve’, Yoko is presented to us in a number of forms, clothed, naked, in high heels, completely draped in a cloth, offering us endless possibilities of cool, scientific examination of her form.
This is Brown’s first one person show for three years. He also has a text work in the Tragic Data exhibition currently showing at Lux Gallery.
13 September - 18 October 1997: Don
Don Brown’s exhibition included ten self-portrait sculptures: plaster figures called Don, all standing exactly half-scale to life size. The post is deliberately banal, completely without the heroics of classical portraiture, despite an allusion to it through its laborious technical process. It attempts to objectify by the use of scale, like a natural history exhibit of an artist/ordinary person, though the treatment and presentation (colour, repetition, plinth etc) belie this.