Cecily Brown Biography

Cecily Brown (born 1969 in London) is one of the most celebrated painters at work today, and among the most prominent women artists of her generation. Based in New York since the mid-1990s, she has built a career spanning more than three decades on large-scale paintings that take desire, movement and the human body as their subject — and the physicality of paint itself as their means. Her canvases are dense fields of marks and layered pigment, where the handling is not how the subject is depicted but part of what the painting is about.

Brown trained in Britain before she became a New York painter. After Epsom School of Art she spent two years on drawing and printmaking at Morley College in London, then took a first-class degree at the Slade in 1993 — the graphic disciplines were in place before the painting degree was. She moved to New York in 1994, at a point when ambitious painting was widely treated as a settled question, and her work found its audience quickly: Spectacle, six erotic paintings of rabbits shown at Deitch Projects in 1997, drew a purchase from Charles Saatchi, and solo exhibitions at Victoria Miro in London and Gagosian in Los Angeles followed in 1999. By the close of the decade she was counted among the painters who had reopened it — with Peter Doig, Elizabeth Peyton and Luc Tuymans, the generation that re-established figurative painting as a serious ambition.

Cecily Brown is among the principal exponents of figurative abstraction, and the work occupies a distinctive space between abstraction and representation. Drawing on sources that range from Old Masters such as Rubens and Goya to the gestural energy of Abstract Expressionists like Willem de Kooning and Joan Mitchell, Cecily Brown makes paintings that oscillate between recognisable imagery and painterly dissolution: bodies, landscapes and still lifes appear briefly before dissolving again into colour and movement, producing a constant tension between revelation and concealment.

Cecily Brown Prints & Editions

Cecily Brown’s prints and editions follow her painting rather than reproduce it: where a canvas accumulates over months, an edition fixes a single state, and the process is chosen for what it can carry. The Tribulations of St. Anthony (2010) is an aquatint etching on pearlescent paper from an edition of 25 — aquatint holds broad tonal fields rather than line, which is why it sits closer to a painted ground than an engraving could.

The digital editions work from the other direction. The 5 Senses (2025), a ditone print, takes its source from The Five Senses that Jan Brueghel the Elder and Peter Paul Rubens painted together in 1617–18, now in the Prado: where they gave each sense its own canvas, Brown fuses them into one image. The Last Shipwreck (2018) belongs to the body of shipwreck works that filled Shipwreck Drawings at the Whitworth in 2017. Each reaches back into the history of painting as the paintings do — which was the subject of Death and the Maid at the Metropolitan Museum in 2023.

Drawing and watercolour remain the ground of the practice — the place a composition is found before it reaches canvas. The limited edition prints carry that directly, and they are the only part of the work issued in numbers: an edition of 25 is considerably scarcer than an edition of 100, and both are a fraction of what a painting costs.

Notable Exhibitions

Cecily Brown first gained widespread institutional attention with her inclusion in Greater New York at MoMA PS1 (2000) and the Whitney Biennial (2004), exhibitions that introduced her artworks to a broader international audience and established her as a key voice in contemporary painting.

The British artist's first major museum solo exhibition, Cecily Brown: Paintings, was presented at Modern Art Oxford in 2005. Institutional exhibitions followed at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid (2008), the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark (2018) and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (2018), each tracing the evolution of her painterly language.

Cecily Brown: Death and the Maid at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2023) explored her engagement with art history — her dialogue with Old Master painting, and themes of mortality, desire and the body. In 2026 Serpentine South presented Cecily Brown: Picture Making (27 March – 6 September), her largest London exhibition to date and her first at the institution.

Her paintings are held in major public collections including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Tate in London and the Whitney Museum of American Art.