Cecily Brown

Brown's paintings combine figuration and utter abstraction while exploring the power relationship between male and female. Expanding the tradition of abstract expressionism, she has become known for a painting style suggestive of abstract and abstract expressionist painters such as Willem de Kooning and Oskar Kokoschka. Brown has minimal anxiety about the art media she uses; she said in an interview with Lari Pittman that "As someone who works with traditional materials, I've always had little anxiety that the medium isn't contemporary enough, that the work could have been made at almost any time." In her interview with Pittman she discussed how she defines 'sexy' and 'sexual' in her work: "I suppose you could say that the sexual is in every painting, whether there is an overt subject or not. The tension within the painting, whatever the subject, is the desired outcome. The sexy would be the girl's lipstick smile or the shoe--the physical object from the three-dimensional world placed within the painting." When she begins a painting, she generally doesn't have an exact idea of what she is trying to achieve, but she lets the final painting reveal itself as she works. Whilst painting she likes to let the paintings develop and change drastically, because she believes the surprise makes her work more interesting. Brown says, "All the paintings I'm working on have more or less the same impetus; the same thoughts are driving them. I like there to be an argument within a painting." Sexuality and attraction are important themes in her work, which she explores through semi-figurative and abstract means. The way she handles paint within her work, becomes the subject matter itself by engulfing her figures within the paint or to use it to add a sense of humor to her sexual imagery. The main characteristic of Brown’s paintings is her use of motion, expressive mark-making and many mixtures of color throughout her pieces. She also constantly changes palettes, so her work consistently shifts over time. Her paintings also recall the works of Philip Guston and the Bay Area Figurative School of the 1950s and 1960s. Brown often titles her paintings after classic Hollywood films and musicals, such as The Pyjama Game, The Bedtime Story and The Fugitive Kind. Brown said in an interview that "One of the main things I would like my work to do is to reveal itself slowly, continuously and for you never to feel that you’re really finished looking at something." She also said in another interview that she asks herself as she works, "How can I paint the equivalent of what it’s like to move through space, to move through the world, to be in a room, in a park, on the street?" In 2013, Brown based a series of paintings on a photograph of a large group of nude women that appeared on the British release of a 1968 Jimi Hendrix album Electric Ladyland.

Since 2014, Brown has been serving on the Board of Directors of the Foundation for Contemporary Arts (FCA).

Brown presided in 2004, along with other artists such as Laura Owens and Elizabeth Peyton, over a Democratic Party fund-raising event, Art Works for Hard Money, in Los Angeles.

Her work has appeared at the Whitney Biennial 2004 in New York, The Triumph of Painting at the Saatchi Gallery, London and "Greater New York" at P.S. 1, New York.

In the February 2000 edition of Vanity Fair, Brown, along with fellow artists Inka Essenhigh, John Currin and others, appeared in full-color photographs taken by Todd Eberle. A photograph that appeared in The New Yorker made showed Brown from the back as she stood, cigarette in hand, studying one of her paintings.

However, some recent critics have taken a different stance. Roberta Smith, in The New York Times, called a Gagosian exhibition it reviewed in 2000 "lackluster" and suggested that Brown's "career is ahead of her artistic development." In a 2011 review for The Guardian, art critic Adrian Searle rejected the dynamic and assertive surfaces of Brown's art and wrote: "What's really missing in her art is character, and for all the hectic painting, a sense of necessity." Likewise, in 2013, Leah Ollman wrote a review of a Gagosian Gallery show for The LA Times, in which she observed: "Instead of powerful and passionate, her voice comes across as detached. The volume is turned up, but the verve is on low."

Brown is represented by Contemporary Fine Arts in Berlin. Between 2000 and 2015, she was also represented by the Gagosian Gallery. She previously showed with Deitch Projects. Cecily set an early auction record when her oil painting Sick Leaves sold for 2.2 million dollars at a Christie's auction in March 2017. Shortly after, Suddenly Last Summer (1999), originally estimated at $1.8 to $2.5 million, fetched $6.8 million at a 2018 Sotheby's auction in New York.

In 1997, Brown created Untitled, a permanent, site-specific installation for the group exhibition Vertical Paintings at P.S. 1.

Brown was born and raised in England before moving to New York City in 1994. Prior to moving to New York city, Brown resided in New York as an exchange student from the Slade School of Art in 1992. She is the daughter of novelist Shena Mackay and art critic David Sylvester. From the age of three Brown wanted to be an artist; she was supported in this ambition by her family, notably by her grandmother and two of her uncles who were also artists. Brown is married to architecture critic Nicolai Ouroussoff; they have one daughter, Celeste.

Brown left London to sign on to the Gagosian Gallery in New York City. She became known to the art world in the late 1990s through an exhibition of abstracted paintings of rabbits. The rabbits in the works are frolicking in bacchanalian landscapes. In 1995, the art world took notice of her work when she displayed Four Letter Heaven at the Telluride Film Festival; it was shown in the United States as well as Europe. The films consist of sexual and pornographic themes, which she explores in the majority of her work. Brown maintained a studio in the Meatpacking District of Manhattan, then in 2011, she worked from a studio at a former office near Union Square. She is now represented by Paula Cooper Gallery in New York.

Brown earned a B-TEC Diploma in Art and Design from the Epsom School of Art, Surrey, England (1985–87) (now the University for the Creative Arts), took drawing and printmaking classes at Morley College, London (1987–89), and received a BA degree in Fine Arts from the Slade School of Art, London (1989–93). During her studies she worked as a waitress and, later, in an animation studio. In addition to painting, Brown also studied printmaking and draftsmanship. She earned First Class Honours at the Slade and was the first-prize recipient in the National Competition for British Art Students.

Cecily Brown (born 1969) is a British painter. 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. Brown lives and works in New York City.