A major retrospective is looking back at the last 30 years of Cecily Brown’s career.
“Themes and Variations,” on view at the Dallas Museum of Art, sees Brown’s artworks—which sit between figuration and abstraction and which draw on and subvert historic scenes—in their full spectrum. Works tease out the historic views of hunts and garden landscapes, or conjure wreckages and interiors. The British painter is known for engaging with art history and subverting tradition to portray empowered female protagonists.
“From her engagement with historical traditions of eroticism and voyeurism from which women have traditionally been subjects and not authors, to her insistence of her own agency through her form and practice, Brown’s work compels us to look closely not only at her layered compositions but also the world around us,“ noted co-curator of the Brown retrospective, Anna Katherine Brodbeck.
Her 2004 Girl on a Swing, for example, is in conversation with Rococo Fête galante masterpieces like Fragonard’s The Swing (1767), and The Splendid Table (2019-2020) is reminiscent of the still life painting that dominated 17th-century Flemish art, with its sense of overspilling bounty on the table; in Brown’s Splendid Table, this notion is transformed via her wild use of color into something more like a sacrificial altar. In several works, the artist draws on the male masters of art history, like Titian, Bosch, Peter Paul Rubens, Goya, and Bruegel, and spins them on their head.
Jan Davidsz de Heem, Still Life with Ham, Lobster and Fruit (ca. 1653). Courtesy of Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen.
The curator added that Brown “continues to challenge artistic conventions and engage audiences with her revisionist approach to the history of art.”
The exhibition includes work from Brown dating back to the mid-1990s. The artist, who graduated from Slade School of Art in 1993, was a contemporary of the YBAs but not officially a part of the group. Over 30 paintings and drawings—with two new works on paper and two large-scale oil monotypes among them receiving their public debut—have been brought together from international private collections and major institutions.
Cecily Brown, The Splendid Table (2019-20). © Cecily Brown, photo Genevieve Hanson.
This mid-career retrospective also comes at an exciting point in Brown’s career, two years after her painting Faeriefeller (2019) hit the headlines amid a scandal around art flipping. In general, market interest in her work has grown hugely since 2007 when her prices hit over $1 million. Her auction record was set in 2018 when the painting SUDDENLY LAST SUMMER (1999) sold at Sotheby’s New York for $6.8 million, well above the high estimate of $2.5 million.
“Although Brown’s work has reached notoriety during her three-decade-long career,” Brodbeck added, “her sensitivity to the social context from which her work emerges has been little explored.”
Cecily Brown: Themes and Variations closes at Dallas Museum of Art on February 9, 2025, and moves on to Pennsylvania’s Barnes Foundation where it will be on display from March 9 through to May 25, 2025. A hardback survey of Brown’s career has been published to accompany the show.
See more images of work in the exhibition below.
Cecily Brown, Untitled (1996). © Cecily Brown, photo Rob McKeever, courtesy Gagosian.
Cecily Brown, Picture This (2020). © Cecily Brown, photo Genevieve Hanson.
Cecily Brown, High Society (1998). © Cecily Brown, photo Rob McKeever, courtesy Gagosian.