Cecily Brown

Cecily Brown (b. 1969), as one of the leading painters of her generation, creates canvases full of sensuous movement. Her paintings shift between abstraction and figuration as bodies, landscapes, and gestures emerge and dissolve in kinetic brushwork. Drawing on influences from Old Masters such as Peter Paul Rubens and Paolo Veronese to modern painters like Willem de Kooning and Joan Mitchell, and pop culture, Brown reinvigorates painterly tradition while resisting fixed narrative. Her treatment of the nude, in particular, frees the figure from convention, embedding it in a wonderful ambiguity. Over the past two decades, her work has expanded in scale and palette, incorporating landscape elements and evolving through sustained reworking. Raised in Surrey, England, Brown studied at the Slade School of Fine Art alongside Maggi Hambling. After a formative stay in New York in 1992, she settled there in 1994, becoming part of a circle of painters who helped restore critical attention to figurative painting.

Brown’s recent solo exhibitions include shows at the Serpentine Gallery (2026), the Barnes Foundation (2025), The Metropolitan Museum of Art (2023), Blenheim Palace (2020), a commission for the newly renovated Courtauld Gallery (2021), a career survey at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art (2018–19), a major installation at the Metropolitan Opera, New York (2018), among others.