Cecily Brown, the painter of desire now turning her brush on parks and crowds

Cecily Brown

Born	1969 London, England
Occupation	Painter
Known for	Destricted

Look at a Cecily Brown canvas long enough and the storm of brushstrokes starts to give up bodies: a knee, an open mouth, two figures knotted on what turns out to be a riverbank. That slow reveal built a market in which her paintings change hands for millions, and it is exactly what the British painter now seems set on complicating. Her London homecoming this year filled a gallery in Kensington Gardens with fallen logs, woodland paths and ink drawings lifted from nursery books, and one reviewer walked out admitting she had come for the hidden orgies and found Humpty Dumpty instead.

Is that a retreat, or the logical end of an argument Brown has been having with painting all along? She has always wanted her pictures to stay unsettled in front of the viewer. “My work has always had a kind of unstable nature in that nothing’s fixed,” she told WSJ Magazine. “You think you know what you’re looking at. You look again and it shifts.” The new work turns that instability on her own reputation, and on the collectors and critics who thought they knew what a Cecily Brown was.

The daughter of the novelist Shena Mackay, Brown grew up in Surrey after her birth in London in 1969, studied at Epsom School of Art and Morley College, and graduated from the Slade School of Fine Art in 1993. The family friend who introduced her to Jasper Johns and Richard Serra, and took her to see Francis Bacon, was the critic David Sylvester, whose interviews with Bacon every art student of the period had read. At 21, while still at the Slade, she learned that Sylvester was her father. Years later she put the consequence plainly: “I’m a nepo baby in London, and here people don’t know so much that my dad was a big cheese.” Here meant New York.

She moved there in 1994, partly because the London of Damien Hirst and Sarah Lucas treated the urge to paint as faintly retrograde. Jeffrey Deitch gave her two solo shows at Deitch Projects in SoHo, in 1997 and 1998, both crowded with copulating bunnies. By 2000 she had joined Gagosian, the rabbits had become human bodies half-drowned in thick, fast paint, and her prices had climbed to six figures.

Fame arrived well ahead of the critics: she posed for Vanity Fair and was grouped with John Currin and Lisa Yuskavage as the figurative painters of the moment. Roberta Smith of The New York Times panned her first Gagosian show; she later recalled finding the paintings “pointlessly messy, gratuitously provocative” and “made to sell”, which they did. The suspicion followed Brown for a decade: that she had borrowed the swagger of Willem de Kooning and the Abstract Expressionists without their stakes, and that the photographs were doing some of the work.

What the suspicion missed was how much reading sat under the surface. Brown raids Rubens, Bruegel, Bosch and Goya, and she takes titles from old Hollywood, as in Suddenly Last Summer. Her drawings go further afield, down to the cover of Jimi Hendrix’s Electric Ladyland. The curator Ian Alteveer has traced the word maid, which recurs in her titles, back to her student years in London, when she paid the bills cleaning houses. In 2014 she quietly left Gagosian, began working with its former director Andrea Crane, and spread her work between Paula Cooper in New York and Thomas Dane in London. “Maybe it would be better to be more involved and not to have handed over the power quite so much,” she said of the move.

The reckoning came at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Cecily Brown: Death and the Maid, curated by Alteveer and open from April to December 2023, was her first full-breadth museum survey in New York, built around skulls and mirror-gazing beauties. Brown confessed to “complete imposter syndrome” before it opened. Smith went three times and then published a column under the headline “I Was Wrong About Cecily Brown”, conceding that she had taken deliberate complexity for busyness because she had never let her own looking slow down.

The market had stopped waiting for critics long before. Suddenly Last Summer sold for about $6.8 million at Sotheby’s in 2018, and in November 2025 High Society, a canvas from the bunny years, fetched $9.81 million at Sotheby’s New York, beating her previous record by 44 percent. She has also turned that pull outward: in 2021 she donated There’ll be bluebirds, which raised £3.5 million at Christie’s for the environmental law charity ClientEarth.

Which is why the response to Cecily Brown: Picture Making, at Serpentine South from March to September 2026, matters. Her first major British museum show of paintings since Modern Art Oxford in 2005, it gave the old charge a new shape. The Arts Desk called its best picture one painted more than twenty years earlier, found newer canvases “turgid and inert” and dismissed the nature walk series as “a picturesque cliché”. Cultbytes headlined its review with Brown dialling down the erotic charge. The complaint now is that she has stopped being the painter people paid for. That is a stranger accusation than the one Smith made in 2000, and it says as much about the brand as about the brushwork.

She has not slowed down to answer them. A sunset, a ruin, a crowd, and a battle, her fourth exhibition with Thomas Dane and second in its Naples space, opened on 29 September and runs until 19 December 2026. Its thirty new paintings and drawings move from the park of her London show to the beaches of a European summer. The centrepiece, Sorrento Sunset, is close to four metres wide, a packed tourist town where visitors fight for a selfie against the light. Over the summer the Cranbrook Art Museum in Michigan hung one of her large canvases beside Joan Mitchell and Sam Gilliam, the company she has long been measured against.

Brown lives in New York with her husband, the architecture critic Nicolai Ouroussoff, whom she married in 2008; their daughter was born the following year. She works from a studio near Union Square, and says she can move from a large canvas to a watercolour to a print in a single day.

Naples may turn out to be the reply to London. The bodies are back, crowds of them, only now they are sunburnt, holding phones and queuing for cocktails. Whether collectors who wanted the lovers in the undergrowth will want the crowd on the beach is the open question of her next decade. Brown has already answered it in paint.

Tags: art, artists, painters, Thomas Dane Gallery, contemporary art, Cecily Brown