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.”
Inside Cecily Brown’s DMA exhibition “Themes and Variations.”
One of the most gratifying aspects of the exhibition has been reuniting with several works that she hasn’t seen since making them—such as the 1998 painting High Society. “The test for me is whether I see things in the painting that I didn’t know were there, and that’s definitely been happening this week,” says Brown, whose complex and suggestive forms benefit from slow and repeated looking. In her choose-your-own-adventure art, painterly winks and references, ranging from whimsical and saccharine to sensual and sinister, are hidden in plain sight.
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.”
Cecily Brown, High Society, 1998.
With myriad conflicting scenes, both silly and serious, packed into one kaleidoscopic composition, High Society remains Brown’s favorite of the series, which helped her hone her signature style of canvases teeming with thickly applied color, activity, and ambiguity. One element that Brown says has often been overlooked in her work, however, is its “absurdity.” “When you’re painting, you go through the whole gamut of thoughts and emotions. It’s similar to something like housework in terms of how free your brain is,” she says, nodding to the “wit” and impossible imagery of one of her favorite painters, Malcolm Morley, the British-American painter and “Superrealism” pioneer. “I’ve always wanted my painting to reflect that life is absurd—it’s always more than one thing at once. It’s that idea of wanting heaven and hell together, because the worst thing in the world can be happening on the most beautiful day.”
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.”
A look at Cecily Brown’s Black Paintings at the Dallas Museum of Art.
At the same time, Brown’s existing portfolio is ripe for reimagining. Having been reacquainted with High Society, the artist is eager to try her hand at a new version. Brown will also soon open an exhibition at Paula Cooper gallery in New York, which she calls a “meditation” on her Met show, Death and the Maid. As many works in the DMA show attest, the artist’s œuvre has become increasingly self-referential, thanks to a rich trove of motifs and archetypal figures she’s built over the decades. She rarely grows tired of her favorite subjects or art-historical preoccupations, be it garden scenes or the hunt, though her inner critic occasionally says otherwise.
“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.”
