Cecily Brown

Born in 1969 in London, Cecily Brown has forged an indelible painterly language in which bodies, objects and atmospheres flicker at the edge of legibility. Working primarily in oil on canvas, she smears, scrapes and reworks dense, chromatic surfaces until figuration and abstraction seem to erupt from the same gestural vocabulary.

Swathes of pinks, reds, ochres and umbers coalesce into scenes of decadent feasts, shipwrecks, bacchanals and carnivalesque crowds, only to slip back into liquid brushwork and turbulent mark-making. Drawing on Old Master composition as much as on contemporary visual culture, Brown’s paintings stage tragicomic narratives of excess, desire and mortality, where pleasure and violence remain inextricably entwined.

Brown studied at Epsom School of Art (1985–87) and Morley College (1987–89) before receiving a BA with First Class Honours in Fine Art from the Slade School of Art, London, in 1993. A formative semester in New York in the early 1990s prompted her relocation to the city in 1994, where exposure to the legacies of Abstract Expressionism sharpened her commitment to large-scale, process-driven painting. Early work explored overtly erotic, often raucous imagery—infamously including copulating rabbits—through which she tested how far the body could be stretched, fragmented and multiplied while retaining visceral impact. Encounters with artists such as Willem de Kooning, Francis Bacon and Joan Mitchell, as well as sustained looking at Rubens, Poussin and Goya, consolidated a fierce engagement with art history as a living resource rather than a distant canon.

Brown’s practice occupies a crucial position in the ongoing dialogue between painting’s materiality and its representational charge. In her work, the gestural excess of post-war abstraction converges with the psychic intensity of Bacon and the voluptuous dramaturgy of Rubens to produce images that seem to both remember and unmake the history of painting. Her canvases have been the subject of major institutional attention, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s survey Cecily Brown: Death and the Maid (2023) and Themes and Variations, a touring exhibition tracing nearly three decades of her production. Within contemporary discourse, Brown is recognised as a key figure in reasserting the relevance of ambitious, large-scale oil painting, demonstrating how the medium can still grapple with desire, spectacle and catastrophe in ways that feel both urgently contemporary and deeply rooted in tradition.