Cecily Brown

The expressive, vividly chromatic paintings of British artist Cecily Brown (born 1969) straddle abstraction and figuration. Brown is famed for referencing both the giants of Western painting and facets of popular culture, wrestling each from their assigned contexts.
This volume provides an in-depth look at one of her most conceptually rich paintings yet. The titular work, The Triumph of Death, is colossal, spanning multiple panels, and conveys the figure of Death riding roughshod over a town and its residents. Inspired by a 1446 fresco housed in the Palazzo Abatellis in Palermo, Italy, Brown’s momentous piece testifies to her ongoing fascination with death. With an introduction by Sylvain Bellenger and newly commissioned texts—as well as a set of related, previously unseen drawings—the book offers comprehensive analysis on this extraordinary work.

The British painter Cecily Brown (born 1969), based in New York since the 1990s, is one of the central figures internationally in the resurgence of painting since the turn of the century. Combining abstraction and figuration, she creates vivid, atmospheric depictions of fragmented bodies, often in erotic positions in the midst of swells of color and movement. Brown pays tribute to the potential of painting for seduction, and draws on references ranging from pornography to elements from the visual worlds of Bosch, Goya and Hogarth, and most recently motifs from the human disasters of our own time. Having also been compared to painters like Bacon and de Kooning, Brown’s work offers a female artist’s gaze at a world dominated by male artists. This catalog is published for an exhibition at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark, comprising paintings as well as drawings and monotypes from the past 20 years.

As a university art gallery with a collection that spans 1500 years, the past holds a very physical presence and is a constant companion in all of our work. Our commitment to the best in artistic practice of the current moment, alongside our academic investigation and curatorial exploration of the objects of the past, enables a dynamic and critical relationship to exist between the two.

These extraordinary works by Cecily Brown, of wrecked ships, frantic and prone bodies, carefully illuminate the tensions between the past and the present. Taking inspiration from Delacroix’s shipwreck paintings, as well as one of the most feted paintings in the world; Géricault’s, The Raft of the Medusa, 1818–19.

Of course, these drawings also push to the forefront of our minds the images we see everyday on our screens, of shipwrecked refugees attempting, and failing, to make their own sea voyages. At this moment it seems more important than ever for galleries to show work that draws our attention to images and stories that we think we know so well and need not or cannot, look at or think of again.

This would be impossible without the work of artists such as Cecily and we would like to thank her for her generosity in loaning her drawings to the Whitworth and for her productive, artistic insight that will have such an e ect on our visitors. Exhibitions such as these are always the result of connections, conversations and friendships and we are indebted rstly to Thomas Dane for bringing these works to our attention and his support for the exhibition. Our heartfelt thanks are also due to Karsten Schubert, and all at Ridinghouse for this wonderful book.