“When I’m looking at paintings from the past, they always seem to be in the present to me; they resonate. When I paint, I feel a sense of communion with the artists who came before me."
Cecily Brown (b. 1969, London, England), one of the most influential voices in contemporary art, is widely recognized for her dynamic approach to painting. Drawing from a rich lineage of Western art history—from the Baroque sensuality of Rubens and Veronese to the gestural intensity of Willem de Kooning and Joan Mitchell—Brown synthesizes abstraction and figuration in compositions that resist resolution and embrace flux.
Brown’s canvases are charged with erotic energy: their densely layered surfaces evoke the human body in states of transformation and dissolution. Like Francis Bacon, her vigorous brushwork and vivid palette activate the painted surface, producing visual fields that pulse with motion. Moments of figural clarity flicker amid the tumult, but the narrative remains elusive—inviting prolonged engagement.
Working across a broad range of references—from Old Masters and modernist titans to the aesthetics of album covers and popular culture—Brown creates a language that is at once historical and immediate. Her commitment to painting as a physical, alchemical act infuses her work with a sense of urgency and sensuality. As she describes it, “The paint is transformed into image, and paint and image transform themselves into a third and new thing.”
Born in London and raised in Surrey, Brown studied at the Slade School of Fine Art before relocating to New York in the mid-1990s. While her emergence coincided with the rise of the Young British Artists, her work diverged from their conceptual framework, reaffirming the expressive and psychological possibilities of oil painting. Since then, she has become a central figure in the reinvigoration of figurative painting.
Over the past two decades, Brown’s work has evolved to include landscape elements and a broader chromatic range, while maintaining her signature oscillation between image and abstraction. Her paintings are often created in series, and she works on as many as 20 canvases at once, with motifs migrating across canvases in an organic, improvisational process. Through this method, Brown constructs a visual world that is both timeless and wholly her own—fluid, provocative, and perpetually in motion