Cecily Brown valuation
Paints so that bodies keep surfacing out of the abstraction and then dissolving back into it.
Cecily Brown was born in London in 1969, studied at the Slade, and moved to New York in 1994, where she has worked since.
What a work by Cecily Brown is worth
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Bio
Cecily Brown was born in London in 1969, studied at the Slade, and moved to New York in 1994, where she has worked since. The paintings are large, worked wet into wet, and sit deliberately on the line where abstraction and the figure trade places: the eye finds a limb, a mouth, a crowd, a hunting scene borrowed from Poussin or Hogarth or Rubens, and then loses it again in the handling. De Kooning is the obvious ancestor and she has never pretended otherwise. A survey at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2023 confirmed a standing that the market had recognised some years earlier.
The paintings are unique and the great majority of the value sits there. The printed and editioned output is comparatively small — etchings, monotypes and a limited number of screenprints — and monotypes are unique impressions despite looking like prints, which is a distinction worth making explicitly when one is offered. Scale matters unusually much: the large canvases and the small studies are not simply the same picture at different sizes. Signature and date are normally on the reverse rather than the face, and gallery provenance is the usual documentary spine.
Two Palms and Blenheim
Brown has made monotypes and etchings at Two Palms, the New York print studio, since 2002, and her first screenprints were made there too, a series in dialogue with The Five Senses, the allegorical paintings by Jan Brueghel the Elder and Rubens. The monotypes are worked quickly on the plate and are close in feeling to the paintings.
In 2020 she showed at Blenheim Palace, in the Blenheim Art Foundation's first exhibition devoted to contemporary painting: more than thirty new works made in response to the house, its Reynolds and Van Dyck portraits and the battle scenes of the Blenheim Tapestries, including paintings, drawings, monotypes and her first textile, a handwoven rug. Two Palms published a series of monotypes drawn from the same source, The Calls of the Hunting Horn. Works from a project like this are best described with the exhibition and series they belong to, which the gallery and studio records confirm.
Epsom, Deitch Projects and Electric Ladyland
Brown is the daughter of the novelist Shena Mackay and the critic David Sylvester. After Surbiton High School she studied at Epsom School of Art from 1985 to 1987 and took drawing and printmaking classes at Morley College before the Slade, where she graduated with first-class honours in 1993 after a semester in New York as an exchange student. Her first New York show, Spectacle, at Deitch Projects in 1997, was six paintings of rabbits, and Charles Saatchi bought her work from it. Two years earlier her short film Four Letter Heaven had been shown at the Telluride Film Festival.
Titles often come from Hollywood films and musicals, The Pyjama Game, The Bedtime Story and The Fugitive Kind among them, and a series of 2013 starts from the photograph of nude women on the British sleeve of Jimi Hendrix's Electric Ladyland. She keeps as many as twenty canvases going at once and lets each layer dry before the next. In 1997 she made a permanent, site-specific painting for the exhibition Vertical Paintings at P.S. 1 in New York, now MoMA PS1, and she has served on the board of the Foundation for Contemporary Arts since 2014.
Best auction results
- High Society $9.8m
- Oil on canvas, 1997 · New York · 18 November 2025
- Publicly reported
- The painting that gave its title to her 1997 show at Deitch Projects.
- Suddenly Last Summer $6.8m
- Oil on canvas, 1999 · New York · 16 May 2018
- Publicly reported
Results as reported at the time of sale, inclusive of buyer's premium. They are a record of what specific works achieved on specific days, not a guide to what any other work is worth.
Whitebank Fine Art is an art advisory and gallery, not an auction house, and is not affiliated with any auction house or with the artist, their estate or their representatives. This page describes the range we advise on. Nothing here is investment advice.
