Painting as Aggression
There's a violence in Cecily Brown's paintings that announces itself before you understand the images. The paint is applied with a force that's visible in the surface — the thick impasto, the directional brushmarks, the evidence of physical effort in how the canvas was worked. You stand in front of these paintings and feel the presence of a body that made them, a body that brought considerable energy and intention to the act of painting.
Brown is British, trained at the Slade, has been working in New York since the 1990s. Her retrospective — which toured in 2022 and brought together work across several decades — was the kind of survey that forces a reevaluation of an artist you think you already understand. The early work and the recent work in the same rooms produced the effect of depth, of a sustained engagement with problems that had developed over time but maintained their essential character.
The paintings are of figures — often figures in states of erotic entanglement, of violent action, of some combination of both — rendered in a way that makes the boundary between the acts unclear. The figuration is not illustrative. The figures emerge from and dissolve back into the paint, are sometimes barely visible, sometimes fragmented beyond coherence. The picture plane is alive in ways that make looking an active rather than passive experience.
Where the Violence Lives
The violence I'm describing is not the violence depicted — though there is plenty of that — but the formal violence of the painting itself. Abstract Expressionism is the obvious reference, and Brown has consistently engaged with that tradition, but she brings to it a figuration that's absent from most of her predecessors, a figuration that makes the formal energy also erotic and sometimes disturbing.
The bodies in her paintings are engaged in something and the something is always ambiguous. Is this pleasure or pain? Is this ecstasy or struggle? The formal qualities — the unresolved figure-ground, the compressed space, the way marks that might describe flesh also describe landscape — keep the images in a state of suspension that refuses easy interpretation.
I find this suspension one of the more genuinely interesting formal achievements in contemporary figurative painting. Most figurative painting either resolves too quickly — gives you the subject clearly and then you have it — or avoids resolution by retreating into abstraction. Brown does something different: she gives you just enough figure to make you want more resolution and then denies you the resolution, keeps you looking.
The large-scale works are where this effect is most powerful. At scale, the paintings become environments rather than objects — you can't take them in all at once, you move through them, and the movement changes what you see. The figures appear and disappear as your position shifts.
The Body as Landscape
Brown has talked about the tradition of the body-as-landscape in painting — the way that flesh and terrain are formally analogous in the history of Western art, the way that certain ways of painting land and certain ways of painting skin produce the same visual experience. Her work inhabits this tradition actively, using it to produce images that are simultaneously erotic and pastoral, intimate and vast.
This ambiguity is not evasion. It's precision about a particular human experience — the experience of the body as both subject and landscape, as both the thing that feels and the thing felt, as both particular and general.
Violent in the best way. Meaning: the paintings do something to you. They don't leave you where they found you.
The retrospective confirmed what I already suspected: Brown's body of work is one of the more coherent and committed in contemporary figurative painting. Coherent not in the sense of sameness — the work has changed across the decades — but in the sense of sustained engagement with a set of formal and conceptual problems that remain productive. She hasn't solved the problem of the figure in paint. She has kept it alive and interesting, which is better.
Violent in the best way. Meaning: you leave changed. You leave with your visual expectations slightly rearranged. The paintings did something to you. That's what they were for.
