About Cecily Brown
Cecily Brown (born London, 1969) stands among the most acclaimed painters of her generation, navigating the boundary between figuration and abstraction with sustained originality. Her work fuses the dramatic compositional weight of Baroque painting with the physical energy of action painting — drawing on Francis Bacon's fractured forms, Willem de Kooning's gestural expressionism, and the fantastical detail of Hieronymus Bosch to create a visual language that is simultaneously art-historically dense and wholly her own.
Brown's paintings are constructed to resist resolution. Vigorous, layered brushwork positions the viewer as a distant voyeur — particularly in works with overt erotic undertones — while the imagery shifts and reveals itself gradually with sustained looking. As Brown has said: "One of the main things I would like my artwork to do is to reveal itself slowly, continuously, and for you never to feel that you're really finished looking at something."
In the late 1990s, alongside Peter Doig, Chris Ofili, and Neo Rauch, Brown was a central figure in the revitalisation of contemporary painting. Her practice encompasses paintings, works on paper, and signed limited edition prints. Brown has been the subject of major solo exhibitions at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington DC; the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid; the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk; and a landmark retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, in 2023. She lives and works in New York City.
