No other location could better showcase Cecily Brown’s endless explorations, reinterpretations and variations of art history than the treasure trove of masterpieces at the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia. Co-organized and co-produced with the Dallas Museum of Art, the major mid-career retrospective “Cecily Brown: Themes and Variations” offers a rare opportunity to investigate and explore the full depth and breadth of her oeuvre through more than thirty works. At the center of this ambitious show is Brown’s ongoing dialogue with art history and the history of painting itself—but for the first time, the exhibition pushes further, examining her practice through the lens of cultural and identity politics and foregrounding the artist’s sensitivity to the contemporary context that has informed and influenced her work.
Endlessly elaborating, revisiting and manipulating historical tropes and themes, Brown’s scenes unfold from the depth of fleshy layers of paint, through lush, lurking tides of color and abstract sensation, to reveal their symbolic power in evoking today’s world. As suggested by Simonetta Fraquelli, consultant curator for the Barnes and co-curator of the show alongside Anna Katherine Brodbeck, curator at the Dallas Museum of Art, Cecily Brown’s intricate work continues to reveal itself the longer one engages with it: in the slow contemplation of details entangled in a fluid orgy of color, art historical tropes and formal suggestions emerge as potent metaphors for universal themes of human existence.
During a press walkthrough, Brown says her approach to painting has always been about engaging in an unrelenting conversation with the past—with the artists and works that interested her and, more importantly, “subjects that don’t go away.” As she puts it, “I’ve always been interested in images of war, battles, sexual violence, sexual ecstasy. Images that show all the contradictions of existing side by side and being really at one with each other.”
The retrospective, on view through May 25, intentionally avoids a linear narrative. Instead, it unfolds through the tropes and themes the artist has confronted over the course of three decades, highlighting her subversive approach to art history—one that relentlessly challenges and manipulates the dynamics of gender representation and gaze bias. Painting flesh becomes, for Brown, an inquiry into the very essence of our existence as humans, suspended between bodies and psyche. An orgy of death and life, her work channels the primordial and vital impulses that ultimately shape our presence in the world.
The final image in the show remains suspended in a limbo between figuration and abstraction, as Brown consistently anchors her compositions around figures and faces that might gradually emerge through the relentless layering of gestural brushwork. As the artist explained in a 2005 interview cited in the exhibition guide, painting for her is an alchemic process—one in which paint transforms into image, and image and paint evolve into something else entirely, a third and new entity. Everything in Brown’s art exists in this tension between improvisation and control, between spontaneous abstract movements and studied compositions that break apart and unfold into a fragmented amalgam under the pressure of the former.
“When I’m physically painting, it’s quite fast. I want to be in the moment, and I make decisions very quickly,” Brown explains. “But then that’s why it’s equally important to spend the time away from it, looking at it, or even, you know, putting it aside for a few weeks so that you can see it again clearly.” She pauses in front of one of her early works from the 1990s. Inspired by hunting still lifes, the painting uses the metaphor of the rabbit to examine the complex dynamics of power within sexual and gender relationships while also referencing the famous amorphous rabbit-duck image created by an anonymous German illustrator and first popularized by American psychologist Joseph Jastrow.
In her approach to painting, Brown fully embraces the ambiguity of the image, playing with its capacity to morph and take shape fluidly—just as much in the painter’s hand as in the viewer’s eye. She invites and disrupts the gaze, letting it wander through a marasmus of paint and flesh, anchoring it with clues and formal suggestions that briefly pause to offer meaning. Her sexuality and eroticism remain more implied than stated, as Brown explains in the walkthrough. “I’m trying to do like the neurotics of the paint, where, rather than draw something like a penetration or a caress, I let the painting suggest it.”
Among the most densely painted works she ever made, High Society (1998) sees Brown allowing cartoonish, grotesque male figures to emerge from the thick, gestural layers of paint. At the same time, the act of sexual aggression becomes more direct in On the Town (1998), resulting in a gripping scene where sexuality and violence, eros and tattoos, are deeply embodied and embedded in a seductive, alchemic accumulation of paint and a tumultuous build-up of bodies. Still, Brown maintains traces of faces, functioning as visual hangers for the viewer—ways into the image—while also implicating the viewer in the act of looking and problematizing its inherent power dynamics. “I included a voyeur or viewer within the painting, another recurring theme throughout the show. They’re usually on the edge. I wanted to emphasize the thing about looking and include the viewer.”
Viewers are left in this charged middle ground, locked in an assiduous hunt for the image, which provokes a more critical reading of the painting in all its elements. “I want to create this reaction, ‘Wait! What?’ as the painting can look in such different ways,” the artist says. At the same time, all the faces are more or less intentionally cartoonish, loosely suggested and almost archetypal. “Humans always go straight to the face; there’s this tendency to look for faces, but people seem to want to locate the meaning of the painting in the face, which I’ve always found very frustrating, while I want the face to be treated as all the other parts of the painting.”
Brown remains in constant dialogue with the act of painting itself—looking, reacting and responding to what the work begins to suggest. She has developed a genuine freedom of gesture over time, breaking away from the rigid structures once imposed by art school. “It’s a back and forth, and that hasn’t changed since the beginning,” she tells Observer, referencing Francis Bacon’s notion of “manipulating the accident”—an idea that continues to resonate with her. Brown has learned this lesson over time. “After the first layer, I’m just moving the paint around and painting instinctively. Then, stepping outside of it, I might try to be more calculated, but I’m now always being open to what emerges and always trying to let go of what I thought I was doing.”
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Accepting and playing with the accident, she emphasizes, has been one of the most important lessons of her practice. She points to a dripping black line that irrupts like ink or rain onto the nude figure in one of her Black Paintings from the early 2000s, on view in the show. Even there, she initially thought she had ruined the composition but eventually understood that listening to the painting was more important than forcing her will upon it.
Still, the Black Paintings came out of her deliberate effort to impose some rules and boundaries—not to get lost in the endless seductions of paint, which had fully opened up after her first successful solo debut, “Spectacle,” at Deitch Projects in New York in 1997. That moment marked a turning point: she was recognized, resourced and finally able to work on a larger scale. “I moved into a bigger studio and could start working much bigger. For the first time in my life, I could afford nice canvases, stretchers and things like beautiful paint,” Brown recounts. “I think I went overboard with making giant paintings and throwing every color. I felt like the paintings were becoming too abstract, too colorful and too sort of hysterical and all over, so I wanted to cleanse the palette completely.” In a sharp ascetic turn, Brown imposed strict constraints, leaving behind the chaotic orgies of crowds in favor of more readable individual female nudes, narrowing her palette to black and white. The result is a suite of nocturnal, shadowed canvases that exist between subconscious and oneiric space, drawing on art historical references that range from the harmonious elegance of Giorgione’s Sleeping Venus, Titian’s Venere di Urbino and Manet’s Olympia to the more dystopian and psychologically charged imagery of Henry Fuseli’s The Nightmare and Francisco Goya’s The Sleep of Reason.
More minimal and contained works in the retrospective introduce another central element of Cecily Brown’s painterly practice, as the artist engages with the full sweep of art history to question, reveal and ultimately subvert the gendered biases and power imbalances embedded in the representation of the female body. This inquiry expands even further in the paintings that follow, where Brown takes on another classical genre: the landscape. These works, as she admits, are the result of a calibrated collage of references and fragments—bringing in the trees of Brueghel, the skies of Nicolas Poussin, a brush by Giorgione—in a flurry of vaporous scenes where the human figure and natural elements fluidly intermingle, as if glimpsed in a fleeting vision from a train, revealing their interconnectedness as they dissolve into one another. “I wanted to suggest something, and I hope that the viewer’s brain automatically fills things in,” Brown explains. “Those paintings come from a moment when I realized the figures can get as abstract as you want if you put them somewhere specific. So then this led to some much more specific skies and grass and trees. Then, you have a flurry of paint, but you’d read it as a painterly event because of the grass and trees and the blue and green.”
Notably, while seemingly abstract, these paintings remain deeply narrative. Brown’s feminine figures are always doing something—animated and active, claiming their dignity and subjectivity rather than passively reflecting the male gaze. Revisiting critically Jean-Honoré Fragonard’s historical painting The Swing (1767) in Girl on a Swing, Brown adopts the same luminous, feathered brushstrokes to mirror the lightness and decorative sensibility of the Rococo master. Yet she dissolves the figures and story into dreamlike swirls of movement and color in a dynamic blend of organic forms that emerge from her layered strokes. At the same time, she introduces an unsettling undercurrent, as if the young girl is already threatened by some masculine presence poised to interrupt the moment of innocence. With a similar tension—between playfulness and menace, pleasure and threat—Brown draws on the tone of Goya’s enigmatic painting The Straw Mannequin, creating a luscious, abstract and mysterious scene that encapsulates the challenge of navigating the world as a young woman. “I love that feeling of sinister yet playful things,” she says.
Similarly, in the nearby Untitled (2005), Brown loosely draws from Susanna and the Elders, a biblical tale of sex and power often depicted by artists like Tintoretto as a pretext for voyeurism, which she reclaims to interrogate the dynamics of agency and passivity. With soft, gestural strokes, Brown paints Susanna eating a bird, borrowing from Magritte’s surrealist imagery to use the uncanny absurdity of the gesture to fracture conventional visual narratives. “I wanted them to be doing something, especially if they were female. I didn’t want them to be sitting there for your gaze.”
The show then jumps ten years forward in Brown’s oeuvre, presenting a series of works in which the artist takes on another recurring art historical theme: shipwrecks, along with the archetypal yet long-abused figure of the siren—long used to demonize feminine power and seduction.
The Madrepora series emerged from Brown’s desire to work more extensively with a blue palette and evoke watery sensations. “I hadn’t used a lot of blue in my life,” she notes. “I often start with just laying down an area of color and then sort of going from there. So I started these blue paintings, and they all felt very watery.” At that time, she was also seeking to depict crowds of male figures, a subject she had rarely explored before. The result is a series inspired by Theodore Géricault’s The Raft of the Medusa (1818-19), a work whose narrative and subject matter inevitably led Brown to reflect on the parallels with the ongoing tragedy of the migrant crisis in the Mediterranean. “I don’t like being in my library tower making work about issues and other people’s suffering,” she reflects. Still, she is drawn to the possibility of engaging with past masterpieces in order to read the present—untethering the sociopolitical implications already embedded in them. “I realized this is kind of what art is for: the distancing that you get by looking at an older painting, even if it’s about a timeless subject and something that still exists, provides some comfort to make it acceptable. You can look at paintings of the most horrific things you’d never seen in real life.” Embracing the possibilities offered by the ambiguity of the image, Brown’s work often invites a confrontation with such layered meanings through her seductive, luscious applications of paint.
Her more recent paintings, which Brown created during the pandemic, further embody this ongoing confrontation—both with the entire history of painting and with her own body of work—underscoring her unmatched devotion to the medium and a relentless desire to exhaust all its possibilities.
In the monumental triptych The Splendid Table (2019-2020), created for her 2020 show at Blenheim Palace in Woodstock, England, Brown engages with one of the quintessential symbols of British heritage—the hunt. Revisiting tropes from her early work and drawing direct inspiration from Flemish painter Frans Snyders, known for his elaborate game compositions, Brown stages the many elements she lifted from his visual language across three panels. Set against a deep red drape, the tableaux unravel into a visceral orgy of flesh and food, life and death. Fragmenting and dissecting the original structure, she lays bare the deeper metaphorical weight of the memento mori tradition, reflecting on enduring dynamics of power, chaos, human nature and morality. “Because I could put them on side by side, you had this kind of endless feast of death unfolding,” she notes.
Brown’s relentless revisitation of historical tropes expands in her most recent paintings into a layered investigation of contemporary visual culture, image production and the mechanics of self-perception. Perfectly attuned to the claustrophobic atmosphere of the pandemic era, works like Selfie (2020) and Picture This (2020) register a kind of forced confrontation with the artist’s immediate environment—her studio, her interior world and the broader aesthetics of self-representation. “There’s a sense of claustrophobia and this sense of things domestic closing on you,” she says of these paintings. Objects blur, and boundaries dissolve, resulting in dense, chaotic compositions where external, internal and domestic spaces merge and bleed into one another. This period also prompted a turn inward, leading Brown to a moment of deep self-reflection and a renewed engagement with her own oeuvre. In Saboteur four times (2019), which opens the exhibition, she digitally reproduced the image of an earlier canvas into three additional prints, using each as a new point of departure. The work becomes both a meditation on repetition and variation and a subtle gesture of reclaiming agency over the circulation of her paintings once they’ve left the studio.
The Barnes retrospective is a testament to Cecily Brown’s singular ability to revise, retrace and manipulate the past in order to prompt a critical examination of how images and narratives circulate through time. Operating at the intersection of past and present, her chaotic and deeply sensual compositions embody the generative force within disorder, capturing the persistent frictions and contradictions between the beauty of the world and the brokenness of our time. At once seductive and unsettling, Brown draws viewers in while urging them to navigate the dense entanglement of perception, memory and human emotion that shapes how we see and understand reality. For this artist, painting is not only a vehicle for reconsidering and subverting what already exists—it is also a means of envisioning what might yet come. Her work begins from a place of cultural inheritance, drawing on a vast reservoir of shared human experience across time and geography, only to expand it, rework it and carry it forward without being beholden to the faults of the past.
“Cecily Brown: Themes and Variations” at the Barnes Foundation opens on Sunday, March 9, and will be on view through May 25, 2025.
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