Cecily Brown

Life and training

Cecily Brown was born in London in 1969, the daughter of the novelist Shena Mackay and the art critic David Sylvester, and grew up in England wanting to be a painter from the age of three. She studied at the Epsom School of Art in Surrey, took drawing and printmaking at Morley College in London, and then read for a degree in fine art at the Slade School of Art, leaving with first class honours. A semester spent in New York as an exchange student decided the rest. She moved there in the middle of the nineties, feeling that London had no room for what she called a painterly painter and that she had constantly to defend the act of painting itself. New York, with its own tradition of exactly that, took her quickly. Jeffrey Deitch gave her a solo show, Spectacle, in 1997, a group of erotic canvases of rabbits that Charles Saatchi bought outright and that made her name almost overnight. She lives and works in New York, is married to the architecture critic Nicolai Ouroussoff, and has served on the board of the Foundation for Contemporary Arts.

The painting

Brown began exhibiting at a moment when painting was unfashionable against multimedia and conceptual work, and she has never apologised for traditional materials. She has said that because she works with them she has always had little anxiety that the medium is not contemporary enough. The canvases combine figuration and near total abstraction, and the subject is very often desire and the power between men and women, carried less by any depicted body than by the tension of the marks themselves. She works without a fixed plan, letting a painting reveal itself and change drastically as it goes, because the surprise is what keeps it interesting; she likes, in her words, an argument inside a painting. She often runs up to twenty canvases at once, letting layers dry between applications, and she uses drawing as a way into the images that both attract and confound her. The titles are borrowed from old Hollywood films and musicals, which cuts the seriousness with irony.

Standing and exhibitions

The critical response has swung hard in both directions, and Brown has been read both as confronting the fierce masculinity of Abstract Expressionism and as too detached for her own surfaces. Roberta Smith of the New York Times, having once called a show lacklustre, later published a piece titled I Was Wrong About Cecily Brown. The institutional record answers the question. The Hirshhorn gave her a Directions show in 2002, the Reina Sofia in Madrid followed in 2004, the year she also appeared in the Whitney Biennial, and Modern Art Oxford showed the paintings in 2005. A travelling survey, Based On A True Story, opened at the Kestnergesellschaft in Hannover in 2010. The Drawing Center showed Rehearsal in 2016, Blenheim Palace took the paintings in 2020, and in 2023 the Metropolitan Museum of Art mounted Death and the Maid, the first full breadth museum survey of her career in New York. The Serpentine in London followed with Picture Making in 2026. Her work is held by Tate, the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan, the Whitney, the Guggenheim and the National Gallery of Art, among many others.

What reaches the saleroom

The major canvases trade in high seven figure sums in dollars at the New York evening sales, and the record has moved steadily upward over the past decade. Below that sits a much broader band. Stop Ignoring Me Sorrel, a small oil on linen of 2010 bought directly from Gagosian and exhibited in the Hannover survey, made GBP 98,500 at Bonhams in London in 2015, and works on paper, monotypes and sketchbook groups turn up regularly in the low tens of thousands. Printed work under this name is scarcer than the paintings and is where a modest budget meets the artist: the sheet LLB Auction sold was a print from a portfolio of 2004 and made a sum in the hundreds of euros. For any work offered, the support matters most, since oil on linen, monotype and editioned print sit in three entirely different markets.