Cecily Brown: Rehearsal

Cecily Brown: Rehearsal, curated by Claire Gilman, Senior Curator at The Drawing Center, brings more than 70 of Brown’s drawings to Museum of Contemporary Art Santa Barbara for her West Coast debut. Arranged thematically, this exhibition is the first to focus exclusively on the artist’s drawings, which foreground her iterative reworking of motifs from a wide-ranging arsenal of source material, including prints by eighteenth-century draftsman William Hogarth, pages from animal clip-art books, and the cover of Jimi Hendrix’s 1968 album Electric Ladyland. These drawings are not studies for her widely-known paintings but rather a distinct form of aesthetic inquiry, one that isolates the investigatory impulse that is inherent in Brown’s work.