Gemma Brown graduated with a National Diploma in Fine Art from Crawford College of Art in 1988 and from Birmingham Institute of Art and Design with a Masters in Fine Art in 1993. She recently represented Ireland in an Objective One art workshop and exhibition in Austria, which will shortly tour to Germany and finally to the European Parliament in Brussels. She lives and works in Dublin.
Being pretty is everything is her first solo exhibition and is the culmination of a body of work exploring the representation of the female face and hair. In a spectacular gallery installation, Browne bombards the viewer with a multitude of drawings of women, resembling the many versions of female beauty which saturate the public domain. Barbie doll faces, Disney cartoons, comic strip femme fatales and vogue cover girls, wide-eyed and beautiful, stare directly from each drawing.
"‘I never work from actual people but rather from second-hand images such as fashion magazines and photographs. The expressions of the faces are aware of being viewed and so, to a degree, are posed but they are also wide-eyed and quite confrontational and so seem to be looking at the viewer. I love to paint the made-up faces and lipstick lips and this in a sense makes them twice painted!’ Gemma Brown" - Gemma Browne
"In Being Pretty Is Everything, Gemma Browne has stocked the walls of Draíocht's ground-floor gallery with close-ups of the faces of young women. Different women but, as the show's title suggests, also the same in their obsessive, relentless expression of a desire to embody a version of feminine beauty. Each face stares at us, wide-eyed, direct, anxious to be recognised. But recognised as who or what? The implication is that each identity dissolves in a vision of generic desirability. Browne worked not from life but from second-hand sources, scouring magazines to find appropriate faces. It could be argued that, by reworking these highly processed and contrived images by hand, with all the fallibility and gestural freedom it entails, she is restoring the vitality and individuality sacrificed in pursuit of a notional ideal, but the point is not dogmatically pressed. Certainly, the warmth, humanity and quirkiness of her drawn and painted images make them consistently engaging. A studied simplicity of approach recalls the stylised drawings of adolescents. The work of Marlene Dumas also comes to mind, although Browne does not have her technical flair." - Aidan Dunne, Irish Times