SELECTED WORKS BY Cecily Brown
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Cecily Brown
Pyjama Game
1998
Oil on Linen
193 x 249cm |
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Named after the famous Doris Day film, this Pyjama Game has no intention of maintaining a squeaky clean image. Cecily Brown’s painting has all the fun of a screwball comedy. Delightfully innocent and sophisticated at the same time, a plot laid out in abstract: mistaken identity, sexual innuendo and glamorous design in 1950s red. |
Cecily Brown
The Girl Who Had Everything
1998
Oil on Linen
254 x 279cm |
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The Girl Who Had Everything is done in the fleshiest of pinks, ripe for the taking. Populated with fragments of figures as twisted and mysterious as Francis Bacon, it has all the vigour of a macho abstraction, created with a pastel decorative palette. |
Cecily Brown
Night Passage
1999
Oil on Linen
254 x 279cm |
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Cecily Brown's Night Passage has all the vigour of macho abstraction, with the pastel decorative palette of Monet’s water lilies, and a girlie reference to Georgia O’Keeffe. Amidst the entire lush-painted flourish, is the impression of a couple copulating. |
Cecily Brown
Hard, Fast and Beautiful
2000
Oil on Canvas
254 x 279cm |
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Cecily Brown’s paintings literally drip with sex. Hard, Fast and Beautiful emits a simple sophistication: wispy charcoal and white gestures, reminiscent of life drawings or underpainting, contain a more carnal impression. Cecily Brown approaches this abstraction like the aftermath of two lovers rolling around on the canvas. A highly rendered fabrication of an Yves Klein fantasy dreamed and savoured entirely from the girl’s perspective. |
Cecily Brown
The Fugitive Kind
2000
Oil on Linen
229 x 190.5cm |
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Taking its title from Tennessee Williams’s play, Cecily Brown’s The Fugitive Kind is as seductive as southern gossip. Brown uses the painterliness of Abstract Expressionism to convey not only raw emotion, but a corporeal sense of connection between painting, idea and viewer. Cecily Brown capitalises on the fleshiness of her medium: paint’s ability to replicate physical sensation: and the dramatic illusion of motion. Within her voluptuous surfaces, epic fantasies spontaneously unfold, as if each brush stroke contains a dark secret: opulent, gritty and tainted with sin. |
Cecily Brown
Teenage Wildlife
2003
Oil on Linen
203 x 229cm |
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Cecily Brown’s young lovers melt into the foliage, fused into the landscape in the heat of a moment. Everything about Brown’s painting erupts with sex appeal: from the soft-porn pastel colours to the oily-wet malleability of the surface. Cecily Brown knows that desire lies in the flirtation: amid her fervent gestural abstraction, just the glimpse of suggestion is enough. |
Cecily Brown
High Society
1998
Oil on Linen
193 x 249cm |
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High Society reads like an F. Scott Fitzgerald orgy: little men in tails and top hats, muscle-bound millionaire hunks pulling themselves to climax, indiscernible bits of sensuous bodies, detached penises, the allusion of gossipy dinner-party crowds. Set against a lavish gold-and-blue background, Cecily Brown’s fantasy is a rich girl’s predilection – a notch in her bedpost for Cézanne and early Pollock. |
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ARTIST INFORMATION
Cecily Brown's BIOGRAPHY

1969
Born in London
1989-93
BA in Fine Arts, Slade School of Art, London
1987-89
Drawing and Printmaking classes, Morley College, London
1985-87
B-TEC Diploma in Art and Design, Epsom School of Art, Surrey, England
SELECTED SOLO EXHIBITIONS
2006
Des Moines Art Center, Iowa.
2005
Paintings, Kunsthalle Mannheim, Mannheim.
Paintings, Modern Art Oxford, England.
Recent Paintings, Gagosian Gallery, New York ( Chelsea).
2004
Contemporary Fine Arts, Berlin.
Museo Reina Sofía, Madrid.
Galerie Lisa Ruyter, Vienna
2003
MACRO (Museo d’Arte Contemporanea Roma), Rome. Gagosian Gallery, Beverly Hills.
2002
Directions—Cecily Brown, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture
Garden, Washington, D.C.
Gagosian Gallery, New York.
2001
Days of Heaven, Contemporary Fine Arts, Berlin.
2000
Gagosian Gallery, New York ( SoHo).
1999
Serenade, Victoria Miro Gallery, London.
The Skin Game, Gagosian Gallery, Beverly Hills.
1998
High Society, Deitch Projects, New York.
1997
Spectacle, Deitch Projects, New York (Storefront Gallery).
1995
Eagle Gallery, London.
SELECTED GROUP EXHIBITIONS
2005
Getting Emotional, Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston.
The Triumph of Painting Part II, Saatchi Gallery, London.
Works on Paper, Gagosian Gallery, Beverly Hills.
Contemporary Erotic Drawing, The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, CT.
2004
Whitney Biennial 2004, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.
A Collector’s Vision, Museum der Moderne Salzburg.
Direct Painting, Kunsthalle Mannheim, Mannheim. Drawings, Gagosian Gallery, London.
2003
Gyroscope, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C. (through 2004).
Under Pressure: Prints from Two Palms Press, Cooper Union, New York
2001
Szenenwechsel XIX, Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt am Main.
2000
OO Drawings 2000, Barbara Gladstone Gallery, New York.
Emotional Rescue: The Contemporary Art Project Collection, Center on Contemporary Art, Seattle.
Figure: Another Side of Modernism, Newhouse Center for Contemporary Art at Snug Harbor Cultural Center, New York
Greater New York: New Art in New York Now, P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center, Long Island City, NY.
1999
At Century’s End: The John P. Morrissey Collection of 90’s Art, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Lake Worth, FL.
Pleasure Dome, Jessica Fredericks Gallery, New York. Four Letter Heaven, David Zwirner Video Library, New York.
Vertical Painting, P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center, Long Island City, NY (1999-present).
1997
Janice Guy Gallery, New York.
1996
Taking Stock (curated by Kenny Schacter), New York.
1994
The Fete Worse Than Death, Laurent Delaye, London.
1990
Contemporary View, National Competition for British Art Students.
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