Cecily Brown British, 1969

Cecily Brown's work  gives the appearance of being in continual flux, alive with the energy of her expressive application and vivid color, shifting restlessly between abstract and figurative modes. Making reference to the giants of Western painting—from Paolo Veronese, Peter Paul Rubens, and Edgar Degas to Willem de Kooning, Francis Bacon, and Joan Mitchell—as well as to popular culture, she commands an aesthetic that breaks from the strictures of narrative to achieve an extraordinary visual and thematic fluidity. Her vigorous treatment of subject matter and the materiality of paint wrestles conventional subjects free from their anticipated contexts. Punctuating her visual shorthand with moments of startling clarity, Brown maintains an endless, active present.

Raised in suburban Surrey, England, Brown studied under painter Maggi Hambling before attending art college. Her graduation from the Slade School of Fine Art in the early 1990s coincided with the rise of the Young British Artists but she didn’t share the group’s conceptual focus, ironic stance, and embrace of celebrity culture. Having spent six months in New York as an exchange student in 1992, she returned there to live in 1994, and, alongside contemporaries such as John Currin, helped to invest figurative painting with a renewed energy and critical significance that has continued to gather momentum.