Cecily Brown

Known for her lush surfaces, vivid color, and energetic brushwork, Cecily Brown inhabits her torrid, atmospheric paintings with life forms that swim amongst swells of color and gesture. Often cast in sensual situations, her figures advance and recede into painterly abstraction. With her various references to art history-- from the seventeenth-century French Classicism of Nicolas Poussin to the Baroque flamboyance of Peter Paul Rubens and the living gestures of Willem de Kooning, among other Abstract Expressionists--Brown reinvigorates twenty-first-century painting. Working alongside the traditions of the medium, and borrowing freely from them, Brown absorbs formerly male-dominated approaches to painting, unapologetically infusing a feminine viewpoint. This publication, which accompanies the first one-person museum survey of Brown's work in the United States, features three major new essays by Jeff Fleming, Linda Norden and Linda Nochlin, as well as a series of key color reproductions.