For Cecily Brown, the experience of looking at art isn’t complete until she responds to it. “A lot of my work actually comes from the desire to just absorb the art that I love,” she says at the press preview for her new exhibition, “Cecily Brown: Themes and Variations,” on view September 29, 2024 to February 9, 2025 at the Dallas Museum of Art. Co-organized with Philadelphia’s Barnes Foundation, where it will travel in spring 2025, the mid-career retrospective is the British-born, New York-based artist’s largest American exhibition to date. While The Met’s brilliant 2023 exhibition, “Cecily Brown: Death and the Maid,” focused on Brown’s exploration of mortality and vanity, the DMA’s show takes a broader thematic approach, with nearly 30 large-scale paintings on view. Chronicling her seemingly benign bunny paintings of the ’90s—in which the prey animals served as stand-ins for humans in the face of sexual violence—to her increasingly abstracted compositions of the present day, “Themes and Variations” underscores Brown’s enduring admiration for art history and simultaneous desire to challenge its misogynistic pitfalls.
Three decades ago, an intrepid Brown rocked the male-dominated New York art scene with her exuberant brushwork, explicit subject matter, and self-assured nature. The rampant sexism she encountered only fueled her fire to subvert antiquated cultural norms, though she remains reticent to connect the two. “I’ve always denied [the notion of my work as] autobiographical content, partly because I feel like some of my early criticism was so personal and gendered that I always wanted to distance myself from the paintings,” Brown tells W. Nevertheless, being surrounded by the spectrum of works in her DMA exhibition, the artist can’t help but confront her journey. “It’s a strange out-of-body experience seeing your life unraveled, punctuated by these paintings. I remember making every single work really well, and these different moments in my life, so it’s pretty intense and emotional.”
From a series titled after Hollywood musicals, High Society signaled a key turning point where human figures and anatomy began replacing the rabbits, shocking the more prudish public. “At the time, I was interested in erotica and thought it was normal. I wasn’t really prepared for the pearl-clutching,” Brown recalls. Upon reexamining works from this series—especially On the Town’s spread-eagled subjects—with more seasoned eyes, the artist proverbially blushes at her naivety. “I am literally outraged now with how graphic they are. It makes me laugh that I didn’t realize how in-your-face they were.”
In stark contrast to High Society’s crowded composition—which hearkens back to figural groups and violent scenes in Western art, such as Peter Paul Rubens’s The Rape of the Sabine Women—are three of Brown’s Black Paintings. In these works, made between 2002-04, Brown consciously opted for a pared-down palette with a singular subject and one of art history’s most recognizable tropes: a nude woman on a bed. The works reference Henry Fuseli, Francisco Goya, and Titian, but here, particularly in, Justify My Love (2003-04), where the subject is pleasuring herself, the woman is an agent of her own sexuality.
Stylistically, Brown considers Titian a guiding light, in terms of how he painted flesh, as well as Bosch and Bruegel. She loves doing jigsaw puzzles of works like Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights and Bruegel’s The Fight Between Carnival and Lent, whose dense compositions have helped “train [her] eye.” The artist says the former is currently pushing her work in a new direction: “I’m coming into a bit of a surrealist moment. I think sometimes when things get too Boschian, I tamper them down, but I feel like we’re in such a psychedelic time that I can embrace my psychedelic side.”
“I argue with myself a lot, between saying ‘you’re doing this again?’ to ‘well, obviously I still have more to say about it…’ I try not to talk myself out of doing things because I think it’s worth doing. It’s just a question of whether it’s worth showing,” Brown says. “I do have a bit of a goldfish memory, which I think is actually good for painters, because you’re basically doing the same thing every day. The fact that I look forward to the work, and that I want to work more, is the biggest thrill of it all.”
