Cecily Brown

UK / USA

Oil on canvas

Cecily Brown (b. 1969, London) is among the most significant painters of her generation. Her large-scale canvases draw on the history of Western painting — Rubens, Velázquez, de Kooning — to explore desire, the body, and the limits of figuration. A retrospective at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2023 cemented her place in the canon. Works held by MoMA, Tate, the Guggenheim, and major private collections worldwide. Represented by Gagosian and Paula Cooper Gallery.

Brown works in the space where figuration dissolves into abstraction — where the body becomes gesture, gesture becomes mark, and mark becomes painting. Her canvases stage an encounter between pleasure and unease, between the seductive surface of oil paint and the violence of what it sometimes depicts.