Birth Name: Cecily Brown
Born: 1969, London, UK
Nationality: British
Educated: B-TEC Diploma in Art and Design at Epsom School of Art, Surrey, England (1985–1987), drawing and printmaking classes, Morley College, London, 1987–1989, and BA in Fine Arts, Slade School of Art, London (1989–93).
Represented by: Gagosian Gallery
Cecily Brown was born in London in 1969. She studied in London and received her Bachelors in 1993 in Fine Arts from the Slade School of Art in London. Shortly after moving to the U.S., Brown had her first solo exhibition in New York at Deitch Projects in 1997 and a second in 1998, both were met with tremendous critical and commercial success.
In 1998 Brown wrote an article entitled “Painting Epiphany: Happy Days Are Where, Again?” which was published in Flash Art magazine. She has become one of the key figures in the strong resurgence of painting at the end of the nineties. Brown revels in the freedom she has forged as a young woman painter, her work liberates and celebrates the sacred cows of old master figure painting.
Cecily Brown is among the most talented painters of her generation. With a formal repertoire indebted as much to porn magazines, comic books and Hollywood movies as it is to the work of De Kooning, Bacon and Hogarth, Brown not only addresses the subject of painting as inextricable from its own history, she engages with the experience of painting as an intensely physical act.
Her winter 2000 exhibition at Gagosian Gallery, New York (SoHo) was her first with the gallery. In 2001 Brown had an exhibition at Contemporary Fine Art in Berlin and then in 2003 she had her first Los Angeles show at Gagosian Gallery in Beverly Hills. Since then she has had solo exhibitions at such prestigious institutions as the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C., the MACRO, Rome and the Museo Reina Sofia, Madrid. The artist has also participated in group exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Lake Worth, FL, the Galleria, Arco, Turin, the Saatchi Collection, London, the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York and P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center, Long Island City.
Brown's work has attracted the attention of collectors including Elton John and Michael Ovitz. She has become known for her painting style suggestive of abstract and abstract expressionist painters such as de Kooning and Oskar Kokoschka. Sexuality and attraction are important themes in her work, which she explores through semi-figurative and abstract means. Her paintings are in the permanent collections of several important museums and institutions including the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, in Buffalo, New York and the Des Moines Art Center, in Des Moines, Iowa.
Cecily Brown lives and works in New York.