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Lot Essay
‘I want to catch something in the act of becoming something else …’ (Cecily Brown)
Streaks of red, orange, sage green and burnt umber interweave and burst with an explosive force across Cecily Brown’s Mean Eyed Cat. Executed in 2012, and included in the artist’s solo exhibition at the Essl Museum, Vienna that year, the painting teems with energy. Thick impasto converges with diaphanous flashes of pigment. Silhouettes and limbs emerge from this painterly tumult, coalescing then dissolving from one moment to the next. Animated black marks conjure the agile movements of the titular feline: a recurrent motif for the artist. The subject of major forthcoming exhibition at the Serpentine Gallery, London opening in March 2026, Brown’s art is defined by its exuberant colour and texture. Enraptured by paint’s materiality, she aims to incorporate its visceral qualities within the act of image-making itself. At the time she made Mean Eyed Cat, Brown had shifted away from the electric pigments of her earlier work to embrace an earthier, more autumnal palette. Sensual, corporeal and tactile, the work’s voluptuous surface immerses the viewer in the haptic pleasures of paint.
When Brown came of age as a painter in 1990s London, her practice stood in stark contrast to the more conceptual approaches of her Young British Artist (YBA) contemporaries. She has always viewed painting with a sincerity rooted in profound respect for the medium’s history. Across her oeuvre, Brown draws on a wide range of visual sources, turning to Peter Paul Rubens for a particular flesh tone, or to Francisco Goya for a twist of social satire. Following her education at the Slade School of Art, Brown moved to New York in 1994, and her expanding range of influences—from Eugène Delacroix and Edouard Manet to American Abstract Expressionists such as Willem de Kooning—reveals a transatlantic education.
During the period Brown painted Mean Eyed Cat, her muses were as diverse as ever. She has mentioned taking inspiration from, among others, Edgar Degas, Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, pornography, and rock-and-roll album art, particularly Jimi Hendrix’s 1968 Electric Ladyland, whose cover featured a photograph of a harem-like ensemble of naked women. This image brought her back to painting the female nude: ‘Formally I was drawn to it,’ she explained, ‘like a pile of body parts’ (C. Brown, quoted in R. Small, ‘Cecily Brown Shows Her Women Uptown’, Interview, 7 May 2013, online). Insinuations of women’s bodies fill Mean Eyed Cat, all rendered in a variety of poses and configurations. The bending figure apparent in the painting’s foreground, for example, alludes to the traditional motif of the bather as depicted by Degas, Ingres, and Cezanne, among others.
Similarly open-ended are the titles of Brown’s paintings, many of which are taken from lists of catchy phrases culled from perfume bottles, films, pubs, and songs, among countless other sources. Mean Eyed Cat was suggested by the 1955 song written and performed by Johnny Cash. Brown is always seeking multilayered interpretations, and her titles are meant to be suggestive rather than descriptive. This attitude is echoed in her brushwork, which likewise conjures an emotional narrative through indefinable and abstracted means. The artist values the immediacy conjured through her more intimately-scaled works, noting that such works often feel ‘grander’ than larger pictures for their ability to convey an entire ‘sense of a universe’ (C. Brown in conversation with C. J. Martin, in Cecily Brown, London 2020, p. 23).
While Brown’s loose, gestural imagery may appear improvised, the paintings are in fact consciously constructed. Each stems from a clear idea that often emerges following an encounter with a distinct piece of visual culture. ‘You grope to understand what might be an image,’ Brown has explained, ‘it remains out of reach, you concentrate harder and other readings flood in, something obliterating the first but also enhancing, exaggerating, echoing …’ (C. Brown quoted in C. Mac Giolla Léith, ‘Painting Sensation’, in Cecily Brown: Paintings, exh. cat. Modern Art Oxford, Oxford 2005, p. 57). Mean Eyed Cat is replete with such layering and a testament to Brown’s uninhibited and generative approach to painting, one that sees the past on equal footing with the present and allows both to produce new meanings.
Streaks of red, orange, sage green and burnt umber interweave and burst with an explosive force across Cecily Brown’s Mean Eyed Cat. Executed in 2012, and included in the artist’s solo exhibition at the Essl Museum, Vienna that year, the painting teems with energy. Thick impasto converges with diaphanous flashes of pigment. Silhouettes and limbs emerge from this painterly tumult, coalescing then dissolving from one moment to the next. Animated black marks conjure the agile movements of the titular feline: a recurrent motif for the artist. The subject of major forthcoming exhibition at the Serpentine Gallery, London opening in March 2026, Brown’s art is defined by its exuberant colour and texture. Enraptured by paint’s materiality, she aims to incorporate its visceral qualities within the act of image-making itself. At the time she made Mean Eyed Cat, Brown had shifted away from the electric pigments of her earlier work to embrace an earthier, more autumnal palette. Sensual, corporeal and tactile, the work’s voluptuous surface immerses the viewer in the haptic pleasures of paint.
When Brown came of age as a painter in 1990s London, her practice stood in stark contrast to the more conceptual approaches of her Young British Artist (YBA) contemporaries. She has always viewed painting with a sincerity rooted in profound respect for the medium’s history. Across her oeuvre, Brown draws on a wide range of visual sources, turning to Peter Paul Rubens for a particular flesh tone, or to Francisco Goya for a twist of social satire. Following her education at the Slade School of Art, Brown moved to New York in 1994, and her expanding range of influences—from Eugène Delacroix and Edouard Manet to American Abstract Expressionists such as Willem de Kooning—reveals a transatlantic education.
During the period Brown painted Mean Eyed Cat, her muses were as diverse as ever. She has mentioned taking inspiration from, among others, Edgar Degas, Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, pornography, and rock-and-roll album art, particularly Jimi Hendrix’s 1968 Electric Ladyland, whose cover featured a photograph of a harem-like ensemble of naked women. This image brought her back to painting the female nude: ‘Formally I was drawn to it,’ she explained, ‘like a pile of body parts’ (C. Brown, quoted in R. Small, ‘Cecily Brown Shows Her Women Uptown’, Interview, 7 May 2013, online). Insinuations of women’s bodies fill Mean Eyed Cat, all rendered in a variety of poses and configurations. The bending figure apparent in the painting’s foreground, for example, alludes to the traditional motif of the bather as depicted by Degas, Ingres, and Cezanne, among others.
Similarly open-ended are the titles of Brown’s paintings, many of which are taken from lists of catchy phrases culled from perfume bottles, films, pubs, and songs, among countless other sources. Mean Eyed Cat was suggested by the 1955 song written and performed by Johnny Cash. Brown is always seeking multilayered interpretations, and her titles are meant to be suggestive rather than descriptive. This attitude is echoed in her brushwork, which likewise conjures an emotional narrative through indefinable and abstracted means. The artist values the immediacy conjured through her more intimately-scaled works, noting that such works often feel ‘grander’ than larger pictures for their ability to convey an entire ‘sense of a universe’ (C. Brown in conversation with C. J. Martin, in Cecily Brown, London 2020, p. 23).
While Brown’s loose, gestural imagery may appear improvised, the paintings are in fact consciously constructed. Each stems from a clear idea that often emerges following an encounter with a distinct piece of visual culture. ‘You grope to understand what might be an image,’ Brown has explained, ‘it remains out of reach, you concentrate harder and other readings flood in, something obliterating the first but also enhancing, exaggerating, echoing …’ (C. Brown quoted in C. Mac Giolla Léith, ‘Painting Sensation’, in Cecily Brown: Paintings, exh. cat. Modern Art Oxford, Oxford 2005, p. 57). Mean Eyed Cat is replete with such layering and a testament to Brown’s uninhibited and generative approach to painting, one that sees the past on equal footing with the present and allows both to produce new meanings.