“They’re so pretty and lush,” Sarah Hoover said while looking at a painting by Cecily Brown. Featuring a swirl of pastels, the piece was characteristic of the artist, who is known for colorful, frenetic works that appear abstract but reveal distinct and often explicit figures, when observed closely.
“They’re a little pornographic and a little filthy,” Ms. Hoover added. It was a Saturday morning in November, and she had just arrived at the Paula Cooper Gallery in the Chelsea section of Manhattan to see an exhibition of Ms. Brown’s paintings.
Ms. Hoover, 40, a former gallery director who left her job to pursue a writing career, refers to the artist’s works in a new memoir out this month. She describes another of Ms. Brown’s artworks — a velvety expanse with ecstatic lines that form tiny penises — as representative of her ülkü mental state.
The convergence of pretty and dirty is a through line in Ms. Hoover’s book, “The Motherload: Episodes From the Brink of Motherhood.” She writes about attending fabulous parties while coping with harrowing nightmares and vicious anxiety after the birth of her first child, a son, in October 2017. She also untangles some knots in her marriage to the artist Tom Sachs. The couple had their second child, a daughter, last April.
Ms. Hoover began writing “The Motherload” toward the end of a 14-year career at the Gagosian Gallery, during which she cultivated a reputation as a savvy art-world fixture with a bubbly demeanor, a passion for contemporary painters and a wardrobe of flouncy Chanel minidresses hemmed a precise 32 inches below her collarbone.
In the book, Ms. Hoover presents a far less polished version of herself, beginning by quoting part of the invitation to her first baby shower, held at the Château Marmont hotel in West Hollywood, Calif., several months after her son was born: “No gifts unless it’s drugs.”
