About the Exhibit 

Cecily Brown’s exhibit at Paula Cooper Gallery’s 26th street location is on view from October 15th until December 12th, 2020. 

Cecily Brown is known for creating abstractions of seventeenth-century Flemish paintings. While the subject matter of “fruit, objects, and dead game” isn’t reproducible to the eye, the rich color scheme is perfectly preserved. 

“Transcending classical notions of genre and narrative, she draws from a wide range of art-historical motifs and contemporary references, building her compositions with a panoply of impassioned brushstrokes and compressed depth of field.” (source) 

“Using art—and often art of the past—can be like a bridge to talk about difficult things in the present.” - Cecily Brown (source) 

“One of the main things I would like my work to do is to reveal itself slowly, continuously, and for you to never feel that you’re really finished looking at something” (source) 

“Grand in scale and richly referential, these kaleidoscopic works have established Brown as one of the most esteemed painters of her generation.” (source) 

“My favourite things are to paint movement, figures in motion, and then tension and violence, but excitement and colour.” - Cecily Brown (source) 

Brown’s work was no exception when it came to being limited by scale during the quarantine. During this time she created easel size works titled ‘Bedroom Paintings' (above).

This exhibit coincides with Brown’s exhibit at Blenheim Palace in Oxfordshire, the seat of the Dukes of Marlborough and the birthplace of Winston Churchill.

Video of the Exhibit

To see a walkthrough of the exhibit, skip ahead to 13:28 in the video below

About the Artist - Cecily Brown

Cecily Brown is a British artist that lives and works in New York. She received her BA in Fine Arts from the Slade School of Art, London. 

“Cecily Brown is known for her visceral and exuberant depictions of the body, nature and historical subjects, teetering between figuration and abstraction in lushly fragmented mash-ups that tap deep into art history and popular culture.” (source)  

“I’m from a small town where my friends laughed at the idea that I could possibly be an artist. But, I’d been saying I wanted to be an artist all my life, so there was encouragement.” - Cecily Brown (source) 

“Her style displays the influence of a variety of painters, from Francisco de Goya, Willem de Kooning, Francis Bacon and Joan Mitchell, to Old Masters like Rubens and Poussin, yet her works also present a distinctly female viewpoint.” (source) 

Brown is represented by Thomas Dane Gallery in London, Paula Cooper Gallery in New York, and Contemporary Fine Arts in Berlin.