Born from Cecily Brown’s sustained meditation on Géricault’s iconic The Raft of the Medusa (1819) and Delacroix’s maritime catastrophes, The Last Shipwreck channels French Romanticism through a contemporary lens of gestural abstraction. The British artist, working at that pivotal intersection ‘where figuration and abstraction meet,’ deconstructs historical narratives of death at sea through an iterative process of drawing and re-drawing, until the imagery becomes internalised and transformed.

The artist’s technique layers vigorous brushwork, creating passages in which figures emerge and recede within abstract fields of colour. The work demonstrates her mastery of uncoupling marks from precise contours, allowing line to cut through colour in dynamic compositional variations that re-energise the pictorial space. This approach allows Brown to extract the visceral motion of bodies in peril—the rocking, wave-tossed rhythms that transcend centuries—while connecting 19th-century maritime disasters to contemporary culture today.