Cecily Brown: Death and the Maid

About

For more than twenty-five years, Cecily Brown (b. 1969) has transfixed viewers with sumptuous color, bravura brushwork, and complex narratives that relate to some of Western art history’s grandest and oldest themes. After moving to New York from London in the 1990s, she revived painting for a new generation alongside a handful of other artists—many of them also women—at the very moment critics were questioning its import and relevance. The first full-fledged museum survey of Brown’s work in New York since she made the city her home, Cecily Brown: Death and the Maid assembles a select group of some fifty paintings, drawings, sketchbooks, and monotypes from across her career to explore the intertwined themes of still life, memento mori, mirroring, and vanitas—symbolic depictions of human vanity or life’s brevity—that have propelled her dynamic and impactful practice for decades.