Cecily Brown is a British-born artist celebrated for her bold, gestural paintings that inhabit the space between abstraction and figuration. Her work engages with themes of desire, sensuality, and the human form, harnessing an expressive energy that recalls both the bravura of historical painting and the immediacy of contemporary abstraction. Through dense, layered brushwork and a vibrant, often sensual palette, Brown creates compositions that pulse with movement and ambiguity, inviting prolonged visual engagement.

One of the most successful, valuable, and collectable female artists of her generation, Brown has drawn on a wide range of art-historical references to shape her painterly language. Red Rum (2001) is said to be inspired by Peter Paul Rubens’ The Rape of the Sabine Women, borrowing from the Baroque master’s palette, compositional dynamism, and emotive force. The abstracted landscape channels Rubens’ cycle of chaos, violence, beauty, growth, and destruction, translating these themes into a contemporary idiom. Here, lush swaths of color and gestural mark-making oscillate between suggestion and dissolution, embodying the tension between chaos and control that defines much of Brown’s oeuvre.

Her work is held in major international collections, including Tate Modern, The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), and the Whitney Museum of American Art. Brown’s ability to fuse painterly tradition with modern abstraction has secured her place as a vital voice in 21st-century painting.