Cecily Brown presents a meditation on Jan Brueghel the Elder and Peter Paul Rubens’s collaborative allegorical series The Five Senses (1617-18), now in the Prado Museum. While the Baroque masters depicted each sense individually across five canvases, Brown compresses this sensory symphony into a single composition, visually fusing sight, hearing, taste, smell, and touch through her signature gestural abstraction.

Created following her major retrospective 'Death and The Maid' at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2023, this work emerged during a period of renewed engagement with Old Master sources, demonstrating how Brown continuously mines art history to reactivate painting’s corporeal potential. Here, Brown layers the composition with thick brushstrokes and generous amounts of white paint, allowing fragments of the Baroque allegory to surface and dissolve: a stringed instrument emerges near the bottom edge, a fountain surrounded by flowers recalls the allegory of smell, while oysters, lobster, and what appears to be a globe from the original Sight painting hover within the painterly flux.

The artwork exemplifies Cecily Brown’s decades-long practice of working at the intersection of figuration and abstraction, where forms oscillate between recognition and dissolution.

Brown’s work is represented in major museum collections and has been the subject of institutional exhibitions at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Dallas Museum of Art, The Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia, and the Museo Novecento in Florence, Italy.