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Lot Essay
In 1994, shortly after her graduation from the Slade School of Art, Cecily Brown departed London. It was the city that had inspired her to become an artist. She had whiled away long hours in the National Gallery and the Tate, absorbing the lessons of the masters. She had toured the Royal Academy in the company of Francis Bacon: a trip that fuelled her visual imagination. Yet London, in the throes of a cultural renaissance, was no longer the place to become a painter. Amid the rise of ‘Cool Britannia’, the Young British Artists (YBAs) were in their heyday, wielding provocative shock tactics and subversive conceptual media. Arriving in America, Brown found a world less cynical about the future of pigment and canvas. ‘It is an intoxicating time to be painting,’ she wrote in 1998, ‘and New York an exhilarating and sympathetic climate. The mood is generous and open and eclectic’ (‘Painting Epiphany’, Flash Art, no. 200, May-June 1998).
Over the next few decades, Brown’s career would take shape between continents. Major exhibitions at the Des Moines Art Center and the Metropolitan Museum of Art would be matched by retrospectives at the Deichtorhallen Hamburg and the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art. Her US touring exhibition Themes and Variations, which concluded at the Barnes Foundation in 2025, was followed swiftly by the acclaimed homecoming presentation Picture Making at the Serpentine Gallery, London earlier this year. In New York, she was able to distance herself from the long shadow cast by Bacon’s death in 1992, and to assimilate his influence from a distance. Conversely, the move brought her closer to the work of Willem de Kooning, whose passing in 1997 had a deep impact upon her American peers. ‘I always felt like they [Bacon and de Kooning] were my painting grandfathers on either side of the Atlantic,’ she explains (in conversation with H.-U. Obrist, in Cecily Brown: Picture Making, exh. cat., Serpentine Gallery, London, 2026, p. 69).
The idea of existing between worlds would come to inform Brown’s art on a broader level. Her work springs from an eclectic archive of source imagery—magazine clippings, reproductions of artworks, images found online—which accumulate haphazardly in her studio. She plunders the depths of art history: from Bosch, Titian, Velázquez and Fragonard to Beckmann, Soutine, Cezanne and Munch. Painting becomes a free-flowing, mercurial process, in which half-recognisable forms emerge and dissolve amid shifting colours, textures and brushwork. ‘I think that painting is a kind of alchemy’, she has said; ‘… the paint is transformed into image, and hopefully paint and image transform themselves into a third and new thing … I want to catch something in the act of becoming something else’ (quoted in C. Mac Golla Léith, ‘Painting Sensations’, in Cecily Brown: Paintings, exh. cat., Modern Art Oxford, 2005, p. 55).
The presence of the human body imbues this approach with a vital friction. Painted in 2013, and shown at the Galleria Civica d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Turin the following year, The Quarrel II is a magnificent example of the nude figural dramas that flourished in Brown’s work of this period. It follows her earlier painting The Quarrel (2004), which itself relates to Goya’s A Fight at the Venta Nueva (1777), whose bright light greens echo through both works. The Quarrel II is also informed by Degas’ Young Spartans Exercising (circa 1860). Two figures are locked in conflict, their forms as luminous as sculpted marble. A tangle of spectators surrounds them, their faces and limbs melting into abstraction. With its verdant setting, flesh-toned peach hues and dazzling golden light, the work emits an Arcadian glow, calling to mind Brueghel’s Edenic scenes or even Cezanne’s languid bathers. At the same time, it simmers with the psychosexual tension Brown admires in Bacon’s coupled figures.
Brown’s work has long delighted in the slippage between body and pigment. Following de Kooning’s belief that ‘flesh was the reason oil paint was invented’, she relishes the erotic frissons of her bacchanalian scenes. ‘Figures are the only thing that I’ve ever painted,’ Brown explains. ‘I’m interested in the human need or desire to represent itself. I’m fascinated with human narcissism and obsessions with bodies’ (quoted in O. D. Odita, ‘Cecily Brown: Goya, Vogue, and the Politics of Abstraction’, Flash Art 33, no. 21, Nov-Dec 2000, p. 74). The friction between paint and flesh is a by-product of her process. She builds up layers of improvised brushstrokes, paying close attention to the forms that emerge and redirecting them at will. ‘With every stroke I always feel like I’m making something figurative,’ she notes. ‘If I feel I’m getting lost in a painting, I’ll make myself think of the form again. It’s almost like trying to remember someone’s face and then letting your mind drift’ (in conversation with L. Rydal Jørgensen and A. Kold, in Cecily Brown: Where, When, How Often and with Whom, exh. cat., Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk, 2017, p. 104).
The concept of ‘drifting’ takes on new resonance in The Wine Faced Sea. Painted between 2016 and 2017, this sumptuous work belongs to a group of canvases that took their cues from imagery relating to shipwrecks. Its title is the literal translation of the Homeric epithet ‘oînops póntos’—typically interpreted as ‘the wine-dark sea’—which recurs throughout the Iliad and the Odyssey in reference to stormy waters. ‘Oînops’—a title given by Brown to another work in the series—also appears in both texts to describe a reddish colour. Here, flesh itself becomes the ocean, with ebbing tides of crimson, rose and carmine. Spectral traces of bodies flicker and fade, hovering above the surface like clouds of mist. As the author Rachel Cusk has written, ‘The human carnival gradually dissolves into lustrous depths of colour, as though being submerged in water … The Wine Faced Sea [is] suffused with a feeling of aftermath, of the surface settling and the strain of interpretation fading away’ (‘We Didn’t Mean to Go to Sea’, in Cecily Brown: We Didn’t Mean to Go to Sea, exh. cat., Thomas Dane Gallery, Naples, 2019, p. vi).
With examples held in institutions including the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art and the Georgia Museum of Art, Brown’s shipwreck paintings occupy important territory in her practice. The artist was particularly inspired by Géricault’s The Raft of the Medusa (1818-1819), as well as Delacroix’s The Shipwreck of Don Juan (1840) and Christ Asleep During the Tempest (circa 1853), all of which fed into a related suite of drawings. ‘I am interested in painting a crowd of people compressed in a space,’ she explains. ‘…Shipwreck is a subject that is incredibly loaded, moving, emotional, terrifying, dramatic, timeless, and the idea of the stormy sea and stormy sky, the straight lines of the crisscrossing sails and mast, the torment … It is an extreme situation, and my work is attracted to extremes. It has everything you could want in a subject’ (in conversation with A. Elkann, ‘Cecily Brown’, Alain Elkann Interviews, 24 February 2019, online).
Brown’s broader interest in oceanic imagery, meanwhile, can be traced back to her obsession with Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past (1913-1927), which she first read shortly after arriving in New York. Proust used the term ‘madrepora’—describing a genus of coral—to capture the narrator’s view of girls lounging upon the beach, and Brown produced a number of paintings under this title. The Wine Faced Sea shares some of the sensuous physicality of these works, with hints of naked flesh calling to mind the carnal hues of Cy Twombly’s Ferragosto paintings. ‘Cecily Brown has found a new authority—is finding it, in these paintings, before our eyes,’ writes Cusk: ‘their quality of magnificence is half insolent, half calmly self-accepting’ (op. cit.).
For Brown, abstraction and figuration are ultimately points on a continuous spectrum. The artist avoids the terms, she explains, ‘because I’ve always tried to have it both ways. I want the experience of looking at one of my paintings to be similar to the process of making the painting—you go from the big picture to something very intense and detailed, and then back again’ (quoted in P. Lewis, ‘Cecily Brown: “I take things too far when painting”’, The Guardian, 20 September 2009). This ebb and flow is reflected in The Wine Faced Sea: the viewer’s gaze zooms in and out like the lulling of waves. The eye circles back to where it began, but ultimately finds itself somewhere new. It is a fitting image of a practice that started with a voyage to distant shores, and which continues to journey into the unknown territories of painting.
Over the next few decades, Brown’s career would take shape between continents. Major exhibitions at the Des Moines Art Center and the Metropolitan Museum of Art would be matched by retrospectives at the Deichtorhallen Hamburg and the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art. Her US touring exhibition Themes and Variations, which concluded at the Barnes Foundation in 2025, was followed swiftly by the acclaimed homecoming presentation Picture Making at the Serpentine Gallery, London earlier this year. In New York, she was able to distance herself from the long shadow cast by Bacon’s death in 1992, and to assimilate his influence from a distance. Conversely, the move brought her closer to the work of Willem de Kooning, whose passing in 1997 had a deep impact upon her American peers. ‘I always felt like they [Bacon and de Kooning] were my painting grandfathers on either side of the Atlantic,’ she explains (in conversation with H.-U. Obrist, in Cecily Brown: Picture Making, exh. cat., Serpentine Gallery, London, 2026, p. 69).
The idea of existing between worlds would come to inform Brown’s art on a broader level. Her work springs from an eclectic archive of source imagery—magazine clippings, reproductions of artworks, images found online—which accumulate haphazardly in her studio. She plunders the depths of art history: from Bosch, Titian, Velázquez and Fragonard to Beckmann, Soutine, Cezanne and Munch. Painting becomes a free-flowing, mercurial process, in which half-recognisable forms emerge and dissolve amid shifting colours, textures and brushwork. ‘I think that painting is a kind of alchemy’, she has said; ‘… the paint is transformed into image, and hopefully paint and image transform themselves into a third and new thing … I want to catch something in the act of becoming something else’ (quoted in C. Mac Golla Léith, ‘Painting Sensations’, in Cecily Brown: Paintings, exh. cat., Modern Art Oxford, 2005, p. 55).
The presence of the human body imbues this approach with a vital friction. Painted in 2013, and shown at the Galleria Civica d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Turin the following year, The Quarrel II is a magnificent example of the nude figural dramas that flourished in Brown’s work of this period. It follows her earlier painting The Quarrel (2004), which itself relates to Goya’s A Fight at the Venta Nueva (1777), whose bright light greens echo through both works. The Quarrel II is also informed by Degas’ Young Spartans Exercising (circa 1860). Two figures are locked in conflict, their forms as luminous as sculpted marble. A tangle of spectators surrounds them, their faces and limbs melting into abstraction. With its verdant setting, flesh-toned peach hues and dazzling golden light, the work emits an Arcadian glow, calling to mind Brueghel’s Edenic scenes or even Cezanne’s languid bathers. At the same time, it simmers with the psychosexual tension Brown admires in Bacon’s coupled figures.
Brown’s work has long delighted in the slippage between body and pigment. Following de Kooning’s belief that ‘flesh was the reason oil paint was invented’, she relishes the erotic frissons of her bacchanalian scenes. ‘Figures are the only thing that I’ve ever painted,’ Brown explains. ‘I’m interested in the human need or desire to represent itself. I’m fascinated with human narcissism and obsessions with bodies’ (quoted in O. D. Odita, ‘Cecily Brown: Goya, Vogue, and the Politics of Abstraction’, Flash Art 33, no. 21, Nov-Dec 2000, p. 74). The friction between paint and flesh is a by-product of her process. She builds up layers of improvised brushstrokes, paying close attention to the forms that emerge and redirecting them at will. ‘With every stroke I always feel like I’m making something figurative,’ she notes. ‘If I feel I’m getting lost in a painting, I’ll make myself think of the form again. It’s almost like trying to remember someone’s face and then letting your mind drift’ (in conversation with L. Rydal Jørgensen and A. Kold, in Cecily Brown: Where, When, How Often and with Whom, exh. cat., Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk, 2017, p. 104).
The concept of ‘drifting’ takes on new resonance in The Wine Faced Sea. Painted between 2016 and 2017, this sumptuous work belongs to a group of canvases that took their cues from imagery relating to shipwrecks. Its title is the literal translation of the Homeric epithet ‘oînops póntos’—typically interpreted as ‘the wine-dark sea’—which recurs throughout the Iliad and the Odyssey in reference to stormy waters. ‘Oînops’—a title given by Brown to another work in the series—also appears in both texts to describe a reddish colour. Here, flesh itself becomes the ocean, with ebbing tides of crimson, rose and carmine. Spectral traces of bodies flicker and fade, hovering above the surface like clouds of mist. As the author Rachel Cusk has written, ‘The human carnival gradually dissolves into lustrous depths of colour, as though being submerged in water … The Wine Faced Sea [is] suffused with a feeling of aftermath, of the surface settling and the strain of interpretation fading away’ (‘We Didn’t Mean to Go to Sea’, in Cecily Brown: We Didn’t Mean to Go to Sea, exh. cat., Thomas Dane Gallery, Naples, 2019, p. vi).
With examples held in institutions including the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art and the Georgia Museum of Art, Brown’s shipwreck paintings occupy important territory in her practice. The artist was particularly inspired by Géricault’s The Raft of the Medusa (1818-1819), as well as Delacroix’s The Shipwreck of Don Juan (1840) and Christ Asleep During the Tempest (circa 1853), all of which fed into a related suite of drawings. ‘I am interested in painting a crowd of people compressed in a space,’ she explains. ‘…Shipwreck is a subject that is incredibly loaded, moving, emotional, terrifying, dramatic, timeless, and the idea of the stormy sea and stormy sky, the straight lines of the crisscrossing sails and mast, the torment … It is an extreme situation, and my work is attracted to extremes. It has everything you could want in a subject’ (in conversation with A. Elkann, ‘Cecily Brown’, Alain Elkann Interviews, 24 February 2019, online).
Brown’s broader interest in oceanic imagery, meanwhile, can be traced back to her obsession with Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past (1913-1927), which she first read shortly after arriving in New York. Proust used the term ‘madrepora’—describing a genus of coral—to capture the narrator’s view of girls lounging upon the beach, and Brown produced a number of paintings under this title. The Wine Faced Sea shares some of the sensuous physicality of these works, with hints of naked flesh calling to mind the carnal hues of Cy Twombly’s Ferragosto paintings. ‘Cecily Brown has found a new authority—is finding it, in these paintings, before our eyes,’ writes Cusk: ‘their quality of magnificence is half insolent, half calmly self-accepting’ (op. cit.).
For Brown, abstraction and figuration are ultimately points on a continuous spectrum. The artist avoids the terms, she explains, ‘because I’ve always tried to have it both ways. I want the experience of looking at one of my paintings to be similar to the process of making the painting—you go from the big picture to something very intense and detailed, and then back again’ (quoted in P. Lewis, ‘Cecily Brown: “I take things too far when painting”’, The Guardian, 20 September 2009). This ebb and flow is reflected in The Wine Faced Sea: the viewer’s gaze zooms in and out like the lulling of waves. The eye circles back to where it began, but ultimately finds itself somewhere new. It is a fitting image of a practice that started with a voyage to distant shores, and which continues to journey into the unknown territories of painting.