Delia Brown is a painter exploring how high-tech culture encourages and facilitates a preoccupation with our own image, and shines a light on the flattening of our relationship to the larger world we inhabit. In the early 2000s she became known for a naturalistic style of representational painting that combined sharp social critique with humor and highly personal introspection. Her work over the last two years has seen a move towards an abstracted figuration, focusing on how our relationship to technology (specifically: smartphones) amplifies our narcissistic and myopic tendencies, engendering a troubling disengagement from the world around us. Brown has held numerous solo exhibitions in the US and abroad, and is represented in museum collections including Los Angeles County Museum of Art and Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive. Brown received her BA from the University of California, Santa Cruz in 1992 and her MFA at the University of California, Los Angeles in 2000.
Established in 1998, the Richard Diebenkorn Teaching Fellowship is funded by the generosity of the family of Richard Diebenkorn. As a Diebenkorn Fellow, Brown will teach two courses during the fall 2019 semester, give a public lecture in the Visiting Artists and Scholars lecture series, and engage with the SFAI community through individual student critiques and other academic activities.
Image: Delia Brown, Are You Experienced?, 2009. Oil on Panel; 12 x 24 inches. Courtesy the artist.
