Cecily Brown
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. 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.
If you own a work by Cecily Brown
Send photographs and whatever paperwork came with it. The first question is what the work actually is — edition or unique, when, and in what condition — because everything else follows from the answer. A valuation costs nothing and commits you to nothing.
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