The British painter Cecily Brown, daughter of the novelist Shena Mackay and the influential art critic David Sylvester, grew up in an artistic household in the southern suburbs of London. Determined from childhood to become an artist, she studied at Epsom School of Art and Morley College, then with Maggi Hambling before attending the Slade School of Fine Art, graduating with first-class honours.

Having spent six months in New York as an exchange student in 1992, she returned there to live in 1994. Her move to New York proved decisive, bringing her into a circle of painters, including John Currin, who were helping to reassert the possibilities of figurative painting during a period dominated by conceptual art. While many of her contemporaries in the Young British Artists movement embraced irony and celebrity culture, Brown looked instead to the traditions of European painting, drawing inspiration from artists including Rubens, Goya, Degas, Willem de Kooning, Francis Bacon and Joan Mitchell. Through her father, Brown developed a friendship with the painter Francis Bacon, whose work exerted a profound influence on her own and remains one of her biggest inspirations.

In 1995 she displayed Four Letter Heaven at the Telluride Film Festival, and in 1997 she was offered a solo exhibition by Jeffrey Deitch. Although best known for paintings in which abstraction and figuration continually dissolve into one another, at the Deitch exhibition she showed exuberant paintings of rabbits which combined humour, sensuality and painterly excess – it was this combination that brought her to the attention of Charles Saatchi and a much wider audience. Over the following decades Brown became recognised as one of the leading painters of her generation, exhibiting widely in Europe and the United States while helping to restore figurative painting to the centre of contemporary art.

Brown now lives and works in New York City, with regular exhibitions in both the United States and England. In 2023 the Metropolitan Museum of Art showed an exhibition entitled Cecily Brown: Death and the Maid, ‘the first full-breadth museum survey in New York’ of Brown’s career.

Until 2011 Cecily Brown maintained a studio in the Meatpacking District of Manhattan, and since then has worked from a studio near Union Square, where she regularly works on as many as twenty canvases at a time. She is married to Nicolai Ouroussoff, a prominent architecture writer and educator, and they have a daughter, Celeste. Brown has spoken of the challenges of balancing motherhood with painting, recalling with amusement that her daughter sometimes complained she worked too much.

Similar artists

John Currin – American painter and Brown’s New York circle contemporary.
Edgar Degas – French painter Brown names as an important influence.
Marlene Dumas – South African painter of psychologically charged figurative-erotic subjects.
Eric Fischl – American painter of suburban figurative scenes with psychological erotic content.
Jenny Saville – British painter of unflinching naked figures and bodily reality.
Lisa Yuskavage – American painter of figurative-erotic subjects in a classical mode.