Cecily Brown: Themes and Variations

Surveying three decades of the British painter Cecily Brown’s career, with its vibrant mixture of gestural expression, canonical and pop references, and subversive themes.

This stunning volume surveys the pioneering career of Cecily Brown (b. 1969), one of the most celebrated artists working in painting today. In particular, it explores her process through paintings and drawings that demonstrate both her radical contemporaneity and her keen reassessment of historical precedents such as old master paintings and abstract expressionism, which have been consistent hallmarks of her art. The book’s probing essays look at her practice, investigate the main themes that recur in Brown’s work, and consider her art from a feminist perspective. Brown reclaimed the heroic gestural expression often affiliated with the male artists of the abstract expressionist generation―largely out of favor with her peers―and in this mode she creates lush, dynamic paintings that often contain erotic content appropriated from art historical or pop culture sources. Moving between figuration and abstraction, Brown subverts gendered tropes in work that often deals with the power imbalances inherent in voyeurism and sexual violence.