. Her struggle to temper the chaos of the human condition was ultimately cut short by her death in 1990, a lack of closure which feels paradoxically apt.
Brown’s paintings from this early creative burst owe much to her Figurative Movement inspirations, such as Bischoff and David Park, defined by vibrant color palettes and heavy impasto. These canvases are stunning from a distance and up close, sublime, caked nearly two inches thick in some places, and roiling like troubled waters.
Her early sculptures possess a similarly messy, frantic energy. “Untitled ,” 1957-60, and “Fur Rat,” 1962, are rudimentary representations, fabrications of cardboard and fur held together by string and nails. But as Brown refined her painting style, her sculptures became cleaner, too. Brown’s work from this point forward trades expressionism and abstraction for an early strain of pop surrealism. Her style became more realistic, if cartoonish, and flat, influenced by painters like Henri Rousseau and the fact that Brown switched from oils to enamel hardware store paint due to a worsening allergy to turpentine. Almost all of her subsequent paintings are self-portraits, mingling facts and fantasies around the recurring character of the artist.
In 1977, Brown was included in the Whitney Biennial, and received a Guggenheim Fellowship, which she used to travel to Egypt, developing a fascination with the ancients. This artistic revelation coincided with an increasing fascination with Eastern mysticism, a spiritual journey that she chronicled in her paintings throughout the 80s.