Location: Berkeley, CA
Medium: Painting, Drawing, Video
Website: deliabrown.net
Delia Brown is a painter born in 1969 in Berkeley, California. She grew up in Venice Beach in Los Angeles, studied at Goldsmiths College, University of London, in 1989–1990, earned a BA from the University of California, Santa Cruz in 1992, and received an MFA from the University of California, Los Angeles in 2000. Her CV states that she lives and works in Berkeley.
Brown’s debut solo exhibition, What, Are You Jealous?, opened at D’Amelio Terras in New York in 2000, and she went on to show regularly with D’Amelio Terras and with Margo Leavin Gallery in Los Angeles. Later solo exhibitions took place at Tibor de Nagy in New York, Maccarone in Los Angeles, and Oxford House Projects in Los Angeles, and in 2024 Galerie Hervé Bize presented a solo booth of her work at Independent New York. In the Bay Area, her work appeared in Tribe at Rena Bransten Gallery in San Francisco (2002), I Love Music at Creative Growth in Oakland (2004), and the touring exhibitions Baja to Vancouver (shown at the CCA Wattis Institute) and 100 Artists See God (shown at the Contemporary Jewish Museum).
Brown’s work is held in public collections including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, the Seattle Art Museum, and the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego. In 2019 she was the Richard Diebenkorn Teaching Fellow at the San Francisco Art Institute.
Brown first became known in the early 2000s for naturalistic, jewel-toned paintings and watercolors of friends staged in scenes of luxury and leisure, combining social critique, humor, and personal introspection. Role-play runs through the work: the Guerrilla Lounging paintings are set in places like Aspen’s Caribou Club, the Felicity & Caprice cycle tells a narrative in small oil paintings with titles like film captions, and the 2006 Double Self-Portraits and Step & Repeats exhibition centered on a fictional artist character, Chelsey Green, who also appears in Brown’s videos.
Around 2017 the work moved toward looser, more abstracted figuration. Demoiselles d’Instagram (2018) showed women taking mirror and gym selfies amid polar bears and harp seals on melting ice, a look at how smartphone culture encourages fixation on one’s own image. Vanitas (2022) returned to self-portraiture after a twelve-year break, with nude or negligee-clad self-portraits surrounded by jewelry, champagne, books, and mid-century furniture.
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