Cecily Brown

Born in London, in 1969, Bown’s family was one of creativity and intellectual vibrancy. Her mother, Shena Mackay, is a celebrated novelist, and her father, David Sylvester, was an influential art critic and curator. This gave her significant access to artistic and literary circles from a young age and her early exposure to the likes of Francis Bacon work and other modernist figures, had a lasting impact on her practise.

Beginning her formal training with the Art Foundation course at Chelsea School of Art and Design, she then studied painting and printmaking at the Slade School of Fine Art in 1989 where she quickly moved toward the expressive, hybrid style that would come to define her mature work.

After graduating in 1993, Brown moved to New York City in 1994. In this climate, Brown’s commitment to expressive, messy, emotionally charged painting stood out as both radical and reactionary. She fused the gestural language of Abstract Expressionism with overtly sexual and bodily imagery, challenging prevailing notions of taste and propriety in contemporary art.

Just three years later, she received her first major solo exhibition in the U.S. at Deitch Projects, where her sexually explicit yet formally sophisticated paintings drew significant critical attention. In a cultural moment dominated by irony and detachment, Brown’s unabashed embrace of sensuality and painterly pleasure offered something different. Her paintings pulsed with erotic energy, while simultaneously engaging with the high seriousness of historical abstraction.

Though her early works often included explicitly sexual imagery, Brown’s style gradually evolved. In the 2000s and 2010s, her work became more abstract, with forms increasingly melting into one another, creating compositions that resist narrative closure. Brown’s figures emerge from and dissolve into lush, tactile brushwork across the dense surface of her canvases through vibrant colour palettes and chaotic compositions. Her work frequently incorporates fragmented bodies, erotic motifs, and references to art history from Titian and Rubens to Willem de Kooning and Joan Mitchell. The result is a visual experience that is at once beautiful and grotesque.

Unlike many of her peers who have embraced new media or conceptual practices, Brown remains deeply committed to the physical act of painting. Intuitive in her approach, she doesn’t plan her paintings before beginning, instead allowing the image to emerge through the act of working the canvas, embracing accidents, contradictions and ambiguities along the way.

This emphasis on process and intuition links her to the Abstract Expressionists including likes of Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning and, of course, Francis Bacon, but her perspective as a woman artist complicates and redefines that lineage. In an art historical tradition dominated by male heroes, Brown offers a distinct, feminist alternative. Her paintings reclaim the erotic, the sensual and the grotesque as valid, serious modes of expression.

Brown’s influence can be seen in a new generation of painters who are revisiting the expressive possibilities of the medium. Her critical and commercial success has helped to reassert painting’s relevance in a digital and post-conceptual age. By challenging gender norms, embracing art history and foregrounding the body in all its messiness and vulnerability, Brown has carved out a singular and significant place in contemporary art.