New York’s Beloved Artist Cecily Brown Gets a Retrospective

Portrait of Cecily Brown. Photography by Rebecca Schear. Image courtesy The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

For more than two decades, Cecily Brown's artistic prowess has corralled audiences through her use of color, brushwork, and layered narratives. Currently, The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York is exhibiting Cecily Brown: Death and the Maid, an inaugural full-fledged museum survey of Brown's work in the city since she made it her home.

During a time when many questioned the relevance of painting, Cecily Brown emerged as one of the few artists who breathed new life into the medium, pushing its boundaries and creating inspired works for a new generation. Now at 53, this paragon show presents a selection of fifty paintings, drawings, sketchbooks, and monotypes, bringing themes of still life, memento mori, mirroring, and vanitas, to the fore of Brown's sincere practice.

Cecily Brown: Death and the Maid invites the viewer on a journey of exploration and interpretation of artworks thematically rooted in Western art history.

Cecily Brown, Untitled (Vanity), 2005. Oil on linen, 77 × 55 inches. © Cecily Brown. Courtesy The Metropolitan Museum of Art.