Cecily Brown facts for kids

Quick facts for kids Cecily Brown
Cecily Brown, 2012
Born	1969 (age 54–55) London, England
Alma mater	Epsom School of Art (1987) Morley College (1987–89) Slade School of Art (1993)
Style	Figurative art Abstract art
Spouse(s)	Nicolai Ouroussoff

Cecily Brown (born 1969) is a British painter. Her style displays the influence of a variety of contemporary painters, from Willem de Kooning, Francis Bacon and Joan Mitchell, to Old Masters like Rubens, Poussin and Goya. Brown lives and works in New York.

Personal life

Brown was born to novelist Shena Mackay and art critic David Sylvester and raised in England. Prior to her 1994 move to New York City, Brown resided in New York as an exchange student from the Slade School of Art in 1992. From the age of three Brown wanted to be an artist; she was supported in this ambition by her family, notably by her grandmother and two of her uncles who were also artists. Brown is married to architecture critic Nicolai Ouroussoff; they have one daughter.

Since 2014, Brown has been serving on the board of directors of the Foundation for Contemporary Arts (FCA).

Education

Brown earned a B-TEC Diploma in Art and Design from the Epsom School of Art, Surrey, England (1985–87) (now part of the University for the Creative Arts), took drawing and printmaking classes at Morley College, London (1987–89), and received a BA degree in Fine Arts from the Slade School of Art, London (1989–93). During her studies she worked as a waitress and, later, in an animation studio. In addition to painting, Brown also studied printmaking and draftsmanship. She earned First Class Honours at the Slade and was the first-prize recipient in the National Competition for British Art Students.

Career

Brown left London to sign on to the Gagosian Gallery in New York City. She became known to the art world in the late 1990s through an exhibition of abstracted paintings of rabbits. The rabbits in the works are frolicking in bacchanalian landscapes. In 1995, the art world took notice of her work when she displayed Four Letter Heaven at the Telluride Film Festival; it was shown in the United States as well as Europe.

Brown maintained a studio in the Meatpacking District of Manhattan, then in 2011, she worked from a studio at a former office near Union Square.

Work

Painting

Brown uses drawing as a prerequisite to guide her work. Through the use of repetition, Brown captures images that both attract and confound her.

Brown's paintings combine figuration and utter abstraction while exploring the power relationship between male and female. Expanding the tradition of abstract expressionism, she has become known for a painting style suggestive of abstract and abstract expressionist painters such as Willem de Kooning and Oskar Kokoschka.

The main characteristic of Brown's paintings is her use of motion, expressive mark-making and many mixtures of color throughout her pieces. She also constantly changes palettes, so her work consistently shifts over time. Her paintings also recall the works of Philip Guston and the Bay Area Figurative School of the 1950s and 1960s. Brown often titles her paintings after classic Hollywood films and musicals, such as The Pyjama Game, The Bedtime Story and The Fugitive Kind.

Her tactile technique stands out among contemporaries and links her to the art movement Abstract Expressionism. However, self-conscious of her connection with artists such as Willem de Kooning and Lucian Freud, Brown often interjects fresh humor or irony by titling her paintings after famous musicals and films. She has been grouped with leading female contemporary painters, including Charline von Heyl, Jacqueline Humphries, Laura Owens, Jutta Koether, Amy Sillman, and Emily Sundblad.

Cecily Brown works using a non-linear approach. Brown experiments with this approach by working with multiple canvases at one time. Working in large groups allows Brown to explore new compositional ideas while continually being spontaneous. Brown describes her process as "organic". She often spends multiple days on works, and will work on up to 20 works at a time, allowing layers of paint to dry between applications.

In 1997, Brown created Untitled, a permanent, site-specific installation for the group exhibition Vertical Paintings at the P.S. 1 Contemporary Arts Center (now MoMA PS1).

In the media

In the February 2000 edition of Vanity Fair, Brown, along with fellow artists Inka Essenhigh, John Currin and others, appeared in photographs taken by Todd Eberle. A photograph that appeared in The New Yorker made showed Brown from the back as she stood, cigarette in hand, studying one of her paintings.

Brown presided in 2004, along with other artists such as Laura Owens and Elizabeth Peyton, over a Democratic Party fund-raising event, Art Works for Hard Money, in Los Angeles.

Charity work

In 2020 Brown donated one of her works to amfAR, The Foundation for AIDS Research, to help fund their temporary COVID-19 research initiative. The painting sold for $250,000 in a virtual auction conducted in July by Christie's, which also included donated works from artists such as Eddie Martinez and Dana Schutz.

Art market

Cecily set an early auction record when her oil painting Sick Leaves sold for 2.2 million dollars at a Christie's auction in March 2017. Shortly after, Suddenly Last Summer (1999), originally estimated at $1.8 to $2.5 million, fetched $6.8 million at a 2018 Sotheby's auction in New York.

Exhibitions

Brown has staged many solo shows and exhibitions in the United States, United Kingdom, and internationally. Her notable solo shows include Spectacle (1997), Deitch Projects, New York; Directions - Cecily Brown (2002), Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; Cecily Brown (2004), Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid; Cecily Brown: Rehearsal (2016), Drawing Center, New York; If Paradise Were Half as Nice (2018-2019), originating at the Instituto Tomie Ohtake, São Paulo; Cecily Brown (2020), Blenheim Palace, Woodstock, Oxfordshire, and Cecily Brown: Death and the Maid (2023) Metropolitan Museum of Art.

She has also participated in many group exhibitions, including the Whitney Biennial (2004).

Notable works in public collections

See also

In Spanish: Cecily Brown para niños